"I suppose you had better ask Mrs. Fairfax Torrington," she suggested.
"Yes, Leonard and she are great chums. We must have Mrs. Torrington. And there are the St. Aubyns, nice lively girls and an inoffensive father and mother. I believe Leonard rather likes them. And then it will be a charity to have Dopsy and Mopsy."
"No, poor foolish things--I was once sorry for Dopsy." The tears rushed to her eyes. She rose suddenly from her chair, and went to the window.
"Then she has not forgotten," thought Jessie.
So it was that the autumn party was planned. Mr. Faddie was doing duty at the little church in the glen, and thus happened to be in the way of an invitation. Mr. Montagu was asked as a person of general usefulness. The St. Aubyn party brought horses, and men and maids, and contributed much to the liveliness of the establishment, so far as noise means gaiety. They were all assembled when Baron de Cazalet telegraphed from a yacht off the Lizard to ask if he might come, and, receiving a favourable reply, landed at Penzance, and posted over with his valet; his horse and gun cases were brought from London by another servant.
Leonard had been home nearly a fortnight, and had begun to accept this new mode of life without further wonder, and to fall into his old ways, and find some degree of pleasure in his old occupations--hunting, shooting.
The Vandeleur girls were draining the cup of pleasure to the dregs. Dopsy forgot her failure and grief of last year. One cannot waste all one's life in mourning for a lover who was never in love with one.
"I wore bugles for him all last winter, and if I had been able to buy a new black gown I would have kept in mourning for six mouths," she told her sister apologetically, as if ashamed of her good spirits, "but I can't help enjoying myself in such a house as this. Is not Mrs. Tregonell changed for the better?"
"Everything's changed for the better," assented Mopsy. "If we had only horses and could hunt, like those stuck up St. Aubyn girls, life would be perfect."
"They ride well, I suppose," said Dopsy, "but they are dreadfully _arriérées_. They haven't an æsthetic idea. When I told them we had thoughts of belonging to the Browning Society, that eldest one asked me if it was like the Birkbeck, and if we should be able to buy a house rent-free by monthly instalments. And the youngest said that sunflowers were only fit for cottage gardens."