The others were walking round the enclosing grass paths that served as broad green border, and Filey, who had been in all sorts of queer places, said the yellow garden made him think of a Mexican serapé--'one of those silk scarves, you know--native weaving made out of the pineapple fibre.'
But Vida only said, 'Yes. It's a good scheme of colour.'
She sat on the rustic seat while Lady John explained to Lord Borrodaile, whose gardens were renowned, how she and Simonson treated this and that plant to get so fine a result. Filey had lost no time in finding a place for himself by Miss Levering, while Hermione trailed dutifully round the garden with the others. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder at the two on the seat by the sunken wall--Vida leaning back in the corner motionless, absolutely inexpressive; Filey's eager face bent forward. He was moving his hands in a way he had learned abroad.
'You were rather annoyed with me,' he was saying. 'I saw that.'
'But you oughtn't to be. Because you see it's only because my ideal of woman is'--again that motion of the hands--'_what_ it is, that when I see her stepping down from her pedestal I----' the hands indicated consternation, followed hard by cataclysmic ruin. 'Of course, lots of men don't care. I _do_. I care enormously, and so you must forgive me. Won't you?' He bent nearer.
'I know without your telling me, I feel instinctively, _you_ more than most people--you'd simply loathe the sort of thing we were talking about at tea--women yelling and fighting men----'
'No, of course I won't,' he said soothingly. 'I can feel it to my very spine, how you shrink from such horrors.'
Miss Levering, raising her eyes suddenly, caught the look Hermione cast backward as Lady John halted her party a moment near the pansy-strip in the gorgeous yellow carpet spread out before them.
'Don't you want to sit down?' Vida called out to the girl, drawing aside her gown.
'What?' said Hermione, though she had heard quite well. Slowly she retraced her steps down the grass path as if to have the words repeated.
But if Miss Levering's idea had been to change the conversation, she was disappointed. There was nothing Paul Filey liked better than an audience, and he had already the impression that Miss Heriot was what he would have scorned to call anything but 'simpatica.'