It was one of those rather incomprehensible happenings of life that she had been left still blooming on her virgin stem. It would have been difficult to guess her exact age. She owned to thirty-four, and a decade ago, when she had first joined her father in India, she must have possessed a certain elfish prettiness of her own. Now, thanks to those years spent under a tropical sun, she was a trifle faded and passée-looking.
Following upon the advent of Roger and his cousin the conversation became general for a few minutes, then Lady Gertrude drew her son towards a French window opening on to the garden--a garden immaculately laid out, with flower-beds breaking the expanse of lawn at just the correct intervals--and eventually she and Roger passed out of the room to discuss with immense seriousness the shortcomings of the gardener as exemplified in the shape of one of the geranium beds.
"_You_ won't like it here!" observed Isobel Carson rather bluntly, when the two girls were left alone.
"Because you won't fit in at all. You'll be like a rocket battering about in the middle of a set piece."
Isobel lacked neither brains nor observation, though she had been wise enough to conceal both these facts from Lady Gertrude.
Isobel regarded her thoughtfully, as though speculating how far she dared be frank.
"Of course I like it. But it's Hobson's choice with me," she replied rather grimly. "When my father died I was left with very little money and no special training. Result--I spent a hateful year as nursery governess to a couple of detestable brats. Then Aunt Gertrude invited me here on a visit--and that visit has prolonged itself up till the present moment. She finds me very useful, you know," she added cynically.
"Yes, I suppose she does," answered Nan, with some embarrassment. She felt no particular desire to hear a resume of Miss Carson's past life. There was something in the girl which repelled her.
As though she sensed the other's distaste to the trend the conversation had taken, Miss Carson switched briskly off to something else, and by the time Lady Gertrude returned with Roger, suggesting that they should go in to lunch, Nan had forgotten that odd feeling of repulsion which Isobel had first aroused in her, and had come to regard her as "quite a nice little thing who had had rather a rotten time."