The unexpected booming of the gong roused Kingston to a sense of time. With an effort he tore himself from his ecstatic contemplation, and compressed the remainder of his toilet into half a dozen crowded moments. Then, flurried, and filled with the feeling that he ought to be apologetic, he hurried towards the dining-room.
He found his wife seated at the breakfast-table, decapitating a boiled egg with her usual crisp neatness, which always suggested that she was doing the egg a favour in making it an example of exactly how an egg should be eaten. She was a lesson to the world. And he felt that she knew it.
She, for her part, noticed immediately that his tie was under one ear, that it was exceedingly ill-knotted, and that it was the wrong sort of tie for that particular collar.
‘I thought I would begin, darling,’ said Gundred. ‘I did not know when you would appear. Such a lovely morning--yes?’
Here, also, she had shown her appreciation of its loveliness by having all the blinds drawn down. A muffled white radiance was all that she allowed to reach her from outside.
Kingston, meanwhile, had been collecting letters and papers from the sideboard.
‘Letters for you, my dear,’ he said; ‘three.’
‘Leave them there, darling, will you? I never look at my letters till after breakfast. It is so nice to make a habit of everything--yes?’
Her husband, returning to the table, helped himself and sat down. For a time the meal went forward in silence. Then he looked across at his wife with intense approval. In the softened light Gundred looked wonderfully pretty. The table was bare--a piece of oak too beautiful to hide--and beyond its dark surface, where silver, glass, and white china gleamed and glittered, Gundred’s head and shoulders rose in soft relief against a very old painted panel on the further wall, a dim, dingy portrait of King Henry the Seventh. Before her on the table stood a bowl of pink and salmon-coloured sweet-peas. In the dim, primeval room, in the quiet mellowed glow, she struck a note of exquisite modernity. The curled gold of her hair, the small clear features, the inconspicuously perfect gown harmonized, in the very audacity of their contrast, with the ripened antiquity that surrounded her. She touched another octave. From head to foot there was nothing about her to find fault with. And, against such a background, her charm was seen more whole and successful than in a garish setting of modern furniture and other, showier women.