She was not in the least disconcerted. She met his eyes steadily. "You mean that I am presumptuous, Mr. Oldmeadow?"
"You take too much upon yourself," he repeated. "As you say, I hope we may be friends."
"Is that really all, Mr. Oldmeadow?" she said, looking at him with such a depth of thoughtfulness that he could not for the life of him make out whether she found him odious or merely pitiful.
The dining-room was very bright and the little blue figure before the fire was very still. The moment fixed itself deep in his consciousness with that impression of stillness and brightness. It was an uncomfortable impression. Her little face, uplifted to his, absurd, yet not uncharming, was, in its still force, almost ominous.
"I'm sorry," was all she said, and she turned and went forward to greet Mrs. Chadwick.
It was a soft June day and Oldmeadow was strolling about Mrs. Averil's garden admiring her herbaceous borders. It was a day that smelt of ripening strawberries, of warm grass and roses, and the air was full of a medley of bird voices, thrushes and blackbirds, sweet as grass and strawberries, and the bubbling rattle of the chaffinch as happy as the sunlight.
Adrienne Toner was Mrs. Chadwick now, and she and Eleanor Chadwick and Barney were motoring together in the French Alps. Coldbrooks was empty, and he had come to stay with Nancy and her mother.
They lived in a small stone house with a Jacobean front that looked, over a stone wall, at Chelford Green, and had behind it a delightfully unexpected length of lawn and orchard and kitchen-garden, all enclosed by higher walls and presided over by a noble cedar. Seen from the garden The Little House was merely mid-Victorian, but the modern additions were masked by climbing roses and a great magnolia-tree opened its lemon-scented cups at the highest bedroom windows. The morning-room was in the modern part, and from one of its windows, presently, Mrs. Averil emerged, opening her sunshade as she crossed the grass to join her guest. She wore a white straw garden hat, tipping over her eyes and tying, behind, over her thick knot of hair, in a manner that always recalled to Oldmeadow a lady out of Trollope. Her face was pale, like Nancy's, and her eyes grey; but rather than blackcaps and primroses she suggested lace tippets and porcelain tea-sets, and though it was from her Nancy had her pretty trick of closing her eyes when she smiled, Mrs. Averil's smile was cogitative and impersonal, and in her always temperate mirth there was an edge of grimness.