"I’ve a piece of news for you. About that land you’ve set your heart on, down at Shawport! ... It can be bought cheap--at least the old man says it’s cheap--whatever his opinion may be worth. I was telling him about your scheme for having a new printing works altogether. Astonishing how keen he is! If I’d had a plan of the land, I believe he’d have sat down and made sketches at once."
Johnnie (with his brother Jimmie) was in partnership with old Orgreave as an architect.
"’Set my heart on?’" Edwin mumbled, intimidated as usual by a nearer view of an enterprise which he had himself conceived and which had enchanted him from afar. "’Set my heart on?’"
"I suppose I had," Edwin admitted. "Look here, I’ll drop in and see you to-morrow morning."
Together they detached the music from the bicycle, and, as Edwin unrolled it and rolled it the other side out to flatten it, they returned silently through the dark wind-stirred garden into the drawing-room.
There were now the two Orgreaves, Tertius Ingpen, and Hilda and Edwin in the drawing-room.
"We will now begin the evening," said Ingpen, as he glanced at the music.
All five were conscious of the pleasant feeling of freedom, intimacy, and mutual comprehension which animates a small company that by self-selection has survived out of a larger one. The lateness of the hour aided their zest. Even the more staid among them perceived as by a revelation that it did not in fact matter, once in a way, if they were tired and inefficient on the morrow, and that too much regularity of habit was bad for the soul. Edwin had brought in a tray from the dining-room, and rearranged the chairs according to Hilda’s caprice, and was providing cushions to raise the bodies of the duet-players to the proper height. Janet began to excuse herself, asserting that if there was one member of her family who could not play duets, she was that member, that she had never seen this Dvorak music before, and that if they had got her brother Tom, or her elder sister Marion, or even Alicia,--etc., etc.
"We are quite accustomed to these formal preliminaries from duet-players, Miss Orgreave," said Ingpen. "I never do them myself,--not because I can play well, but because I am hardened. Now shall we start? Will you take the treble or the bass?"