"I can only hope you will be able to persuade him," said John, rising to go away, "for whatever you may think, you are a country bird, and you want the fresh air."
"Are you going, John? Well, perhaps it is better. Good-by. Don't trouble your mind about me whether I go or stay."
"Do you mean I am not to come again, Elinor?"
"Oh, why should I mean that?" she said. "You are so hard upon me in your thoughts;" but she did not say that he was wrong, and John went out from the door saying to himself that he would not go again. He saw through the open door of the dining-room that the table was prepared sumptuously for a dinner-party. It was shining with silver and crystal, the silver Mrs. Dennistoun's old service, which she had brought up with her from Windyhill, and which as a matter of convenience she had left behind with her daughter. Would it ever, he wondered, see Windyhill again?
He went on to his club, and there some one began to amuse him with an account of Lady Durford's ball, to which Lady Mariamne had wished to take him. "Are not those Comptons relations of yours, Tatham?" he said.
"I'm very glad that's all. They are a queer lot. Phil Compton you know--the dis-Honourable Phil, as he used to be called--but I hear he's turned over a new leaf----"
"Oh, nothing much: only that he was flirting desperately all the evening with a Mrs. Harris, an American widow. I believe he came with her--and his own wife there--much younger, much prettier, a beautiful young creature--looking on with astonishment. You could see her eyes growing bigger and bigger. If it had not been kind of amusing to a looker-on, it would be the most pitiful sight in the world."
"I advise you not to let yourself be amused by such trifles," said John Tatham, with a look of fire and flame.
As a matter of fact, Elinor did not go to the Cottage for the fresh air or anything else. She made one hurried run in the afternoon to bid her mother good-by, alone, which was not a visit, but the mere pretence of a visit, hurried and breathless, in which there was no time to talk of anything. She gave Mrs. Dennistoun an account of the usual lists of visits that her husband and she were to make in the autumn, which the mother, with the usual instinct of mothers, thought too much. "You will wear yourself to death, Elinor."