I, the lady's-maid, have meals with the staff in the big, slate-floored kitchen.
This I insisted upon, just as I insisted upon travelling third-class down from Euston, while my young mistress "went first."
"We've simply got to behave more like real mistress and maid, now that you've taken a country house for the summer," I told her. "This isn't the 'Refuge'----"
"It's nowhere so lively, if you ask me," said Miss Million, looking disconsolately out of the dining-room window. "Look at that view!"
The "view" shows a rain-soaked lawn, stretching down to a tall rhododendron hedge, also dripping with rain. Beneath the hedge is spread a dank carpet of fallen pink blooms. Beyond the hedge is a brook that was once a lane, leading down to a river that was once a brook.
Beyond this come a flooded field and the highroad that is a network of puddles. In the distance there rises like a screen against the sky a tall hill, wooded almost to the top, and set half-way up this hill we can descry, faintly through the driving rain, a long white house, with gables and a veranda overgrown with red roses. And above all is a strip of grey sky, from which the white rain falls noiselessly, ceaselessly.
"Here's a place!" says Miss Million disgustedly. "Unless something happens to make it a bit different, I shan't stay no three months, nor three weeks. It fair gives me the pip, and I wish I was back in good old London!"
"Cheer up. The rain may leave off one of these days," I say, "or some of the people of the neighbourhood may come to call."
This afternoon both my prognostications were fulfilled.
The rain did leave off, and the valley in which this house is set became a green and smiling paradise, scented with the fragrance of wet pine trees, and of sweet peas and honeysuckle, and suddenly pregnant with that other flavour which is new to me--part scent, part sight, part sound. "The flavour of Wales"--some quality quite indescribable; some wild native atmosphere richer, sadder, sweeter, more "original" than any that I had breathed in those flat, smiling garden plots that are described as "rural England."
No wonder I've always heard that Welsh people who have left their country suffer at times from such poignant longings, such "hiræth" or home-sickness as is unknown to the colonising, conquering Saxon!