T really seemed as if the hasty summoning of Miss Caldecott back to Stonorill had not really been needful; as if the unaided eye of the Prime Minister would have been powerful enough to restrain the Lady Noggs from upheaving the peaceful lives around her, so good was she for some time after her brief, meteor-like course through the hearts and home of the royal house of Meiningen-Schwerin.
If she was good, so was Mr. Borrodaile. He did not make any show of his admiration for Miss Caldecott, or, to be exact, he made no more show of it than he had done before she went away.
She was beyond measure relieved by his quietude. Since she found his admiration very pleasant, she persuaded herself with the less difficulty that there was no need to take it seriously, no need ever again to feel any thrill at the sight either of himself or his handwriting. She quite overlooked the interesting psychological fact that thrills are hardly under the direction of the human reason or the human will. Assuredly, it never occurred to her that Mr. Borrodaile, with the machiavelian shrewdness of an accomplished diplomat, might be biding his time, making himself more and more a necessary part of her life until the time came when she should find it hard indeed to do without him. Possibly this course of action was not very clearly defined in his mind. He may have been following it by instinct, only aware that it behooved him to make his approaches slowly and with caution. Be that as it may, after showing herself cold and firmly disposed to fall in with none of his suggestions for a few days, she suffered him to take up again his old, jesting intimacy with her.
It was one of those delightful summer mornings when a light haze blurring the landscape promises a glorious sunny day. The Lady Noggs came upstairs, after breakfasting with her uncle, in a profound self-satisfaction, induced by the fact that she had behaved to him with a nice consideration, and cheered his meal with many profound and judicious observations on the European situation, which she had heard Mr. Borrodaile discussing with a political guest the night before.
She pulled off the decorative frock, so harmonious with her vivid beauty, in which she had breakfasted, and was arraying herself in a more severe and workmanlike garb of dark blue linen, when the summer air wafted in through the window all the scents of the distant wood. She stopped short in her robing, went to the window, looked out and sighed. The air seemed to her to be teeming with invitations to forsake the house for the open country. She looked slowly round the woods and meadows and her eyes shone with a sudden light. She turned and looked at the clock. It wanted seven minutes to ten, the hour at which her lessons began. With hasty fingers she finished fastening her frock, snatched up a straw hat from the bed, and, holding it low down against her frock, walked out of the room and down the stairs with a look of singular and if anything exaggerated innocence in her limpid eyes.
She met no one but Mr. Borrodaile. At the sight of her excessive innocence his eyes grew alert; then he saw the hat in her hand, and a look of understanding filled his face. The innocence and the hat in conjunction meant truancy. He opened his mouth to turn her from her purpose by a timely rebuke, then shut it quickly. The prospect of a pleasant hour or two in the woods with Miss Caldecott, hunting for her vanished charge, opened before his mental vision. He passed the Lady Noggs without a word.
She slipped out of the side door into the shrubberies, and with flying skirts and streaming hair raced for the wood. Once in its cool shelter, she slackened her pace to a saunter, and, fanning herself with her hat, began to enjoy her freedom.
She went slowly and very softly along the paths which led to the wood's heart, stopping many times to watch the doings of its furred and feathered inhabitants,—a dispute between a jay and some finches, the young rabbits playing in the drives, the gambols of families of squirrels in the tree-tops; enjoying the while the scented air, the dull, pervasive hum of insects, and the singing of the birds. She wandered right through the wood, and was passing along the edge of it where it borders on the meadows which stretch between it and Stonorill village, when she heard voices of children on the other side of the hedge. The quality of them struck her at once. They were not the low, drawling voices of the Stonorill children, but high-pitched and twanging; and she knew that she was listening to some of the slum children from London who are sent down every summer by some charitable society, and lodge in the cottages of the Stonorill villagers.