A reversion to type

by E. M. Delafield

V

“What do they want to start off so early for?” said Rose disconsolately, when the men of the party went away the next morning with their guns as soon as breakfast was over.

She envisaged without enthusiasm the prospect of a morning spent tête-à-tête with Miss Grierson-Amberly.

“Where’s Cecil?” Diana asked. “Couldn’t we take him out?”

Rose’s face lightened immediately.

“That’d be lovely, and it’s simply sweet of you to think of it. He has lessons in the morning, but I should think he could come with us at lunch time.”

They were to meet the guns for luncheon.

“He’d enjoy that, wouldn’t he, and it would be great fun to have him,” Diana said in her placid voice.

Rose wondered whether she ever spoke vehemently or with passion. It did not seem likely.

Lady Aviolet was in her own room, and Rose felt, uneasily, that upon her devolved the entertainment of the visitor.

“What would you like to do?” she demanded abruptly, far too unsure of her ground to make any suggestion, and completely convinced that Diana would be at no loss.

“Please don’t let me be a bother, I’m sure you’re very busy. I’d love to go round the garden, if I may.”

The garden, of course!

Rose never could remember that a garden was interesting.

“I’ll come with you,” she volunteered.

She did not like to ask Miss Grierson-Amberly to wait while she went upstairs and changed her shoes, so she went out in her thin house-slippers and inappropriate openwork stockings. The girl, she noticed, had come down to breakfast wearing thick, heavy shoes with fringed tongues and woollen stockings.

“How’s the rock-garden?” Diana inquired.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

“Lady Aviolet always has such nice things. Are you keen on gardening too?”

“I don’t really know anything about it.”

“Neither do I,” Diana assured her, but Rose felt that their disclaimers were based upon the radically differing foundations of modesty and truthfulness respectively.

Their progress round the garden was punctuated by interested exclamations and inquiries from Diana, to which Rose made but inadequate rejoinders.

“What is that? I know I ought to know, we’ve got some at home, but I can’t remember.”

“It’s a lily,” said Rose, surprised.

“Yes. I meant what sort,” Diana explained gently.

They went into the hothouses.

“It reminds me of Colombo,” Rose said, of the moist, hot atmosphere.

An odd wave of nostalgia came over her, less for the East than for the sense of something familiar, well known to her, and holding none of the pitfalls that she felt to be everywhere in the strange surroundings of her new life.

“Why, I’ve only this minute thought of it, but of course you must have known the Powerfields in Colombo!” Diana’s tone of pleased discovery interrupted her thoughts.

“The Powerfields?”

“Betty Powerfield was a friend of mine before she married. I haven’t seen her since she married Sir William.”

“We were up-country most of the time, we didn’t know any of the Government House people; of course I’ve seen them at the Races, and places like that, but that’s all.”

“How stupid of me! I forgot you were up-country. Of course, one forgets the distances out there.”

Rose swallowed audibly.

“We were in Colombo quite a lot, as well as up-country but we didn’t know the Government House people anyway. Jim didn’t even put our names down in the book, so of course we didn’t get asked to even the official parties. It wouldn’t have been any use.”

Diana did not try to elucidate this cryptic remark.

She talked about gardening again.

“Are you very fond of the country?” Rose said to her at last.

“I like it better than London, I think, really.”

It seemed as though superlatives were for ever outside the range of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s vocabulary.

“London is great fun, of course, though I always think it’s rather a pity to go there just when the country is nicest—May and June, you know. But, of course, in the winter, there’s the hunting. Do you hunt, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Oh, Lord, no!”

“I suppose your little boy will want to start. All the Aviolets ride so well.”

“Ces can ride,” said Rose proudly. “He took to it quite naturally and wasn’t a bit afraid.”

“Oh, good. Shall you let him hunt this winter?”

“Yes, if they want him to.”

Rose was quite steady and resolved upon that point. She herself was afraid of horses, knowing nothing about them. Her stock comment, at the Sunday after-church progress of inspection round the stables, was always: “That horse is a pretty colour, isn’t it?” But she was eager that Cecil should be less ignorant than she was herself, and proud that he should have learnt to ride. She began to tell Miss Grierson-Amberly of his prowess, boasting freely, and almost unheeding of the civil sounds of interest and attention that her companion from time to time emitted. Indeed, as they returned to the house, Rose was inwardly congratulating herself naïvely on having found a congenial topic that had caused the time to pass so quickly.

In the hall she stopped dead, and jerked her head in the direction of Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, of which the door stood ajar, revealing a glimpse of the grey-headed, square-shouldered figure at the table.

“I say—you ask her, won’t you?”

“Ask her—who? What?”

“If Ces may come out to lunch with us,” whispered Rose, like a schoolgirl. “I don’t like to, and besides she’ll be more likely to say Yes if you ask.”

Diana laughed rather uncertainly, as though slightly disconcerted by the manner of the request, but she obligingly made her suggestion to Lady Aviolet.

“A very good idea, if Rose will allow it, and there is no objection on the score of lessons. Rose, will you arrange it with Miss Wade, my dear?”

Lady Aviolet always deferred to Cecil’s mother in all such minor questions, and yet Rose never doubted for a moment that the older woman deplored her upbringing of little Cecil, and looked forward to his schooldays as to a time of regeneration.

As she thought of it, Rose’s young face assumed slowly a look of almost mule-like stubbornness. It was as though, like an animal, she was unable to formulate the terms of her problem rationally, and sought refuge in blind, unassailable instinct.

“Ces isn’t going to school,” she muttered. “They’ll make him worse there.”

She often thought of Cecil’s boyish untruthfulness as a disease, just as Lady Aviolet viewed it as the result of a lack of education, Sir Thomas as a vulgar form of childish naughtiness, and Ford——?

It was not so easy to penetrate to Ford’s convictions, but he had hinted that a mixed heredity led to strange results, and Rose knew that his family pride was outraged by the infusion of Smith blood in Cecil’s veins. She even had a certain tolerant understanding of his feelings, though none for his unpleasing manifestations of them.

It annoyed her, secretly, to see that little Cecil admired his uncle, even although he sometimes seemed to be afraid of him.

Cecil was joyful and excited at the prospect of lunch out of doors. In the pony-cart, he chattered incessantly, and Lady Aviolet responded with great patience, until he suddenly said:

“I can carry the partridges for them. I always carry the rabbits when Uncle Ford shoots. Sometimes they’re all bleeding, but I don’t mind a bit. I always carry them.”

“Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply, “don’t boast! How many times have you carried the shot rabbits for Uncle Ford?”

There was just that suggestion of a trap for inaccuracy in her tone that always scared Cecil, and Rose hastily answered for him.

“Only once, wasn’t it, Cecil?”

“Then why does he say ‘always’?” said Lady Aviolet.

She had long ago told Rose that they must be very particular never to let any mis-statement from Cecil pass unchallenged. It was their one hope, she explained, of inculcating the habit of truthfulness. Cecil now looked confused and alarmed, and as his grandmother fixed her eyes upon him severely he said: “I meant once, Grandmama.”

“Try and always say what you mean, my dear,” she told him.

Cecil was silent for the rest of the drive, but when they reached the keeper’s lodge in the wood he pulled Rose into a corner:

“Are you angry, Mummie?”

“No, of course not.” She kissed him resoundingly.

“I did, really and truly, carry the rabbits for Uncle Ford.”

“But not lots of times, Ces.”

“Three times,” he said, nodding his head. “That first time of all, when Dr. Lucian was there too, and once the day that Miss Wade came, and the day before yesterday. That makes three.”

Rose suddenly remembered. It was true that Cecil had performed the office three times for Ford.

“But then—you told Grandmama just now that you meant only once!”

“I thought that was what she wanted me to say,” explained Cecil piteously.

“Oh, good Lord!” said Rose.

A sort of blank terror invaded her spirit, as the total lack of any apprehension of truth now and then betrayed by Cecil confronted her again.

For a moment she could not speak.

“Come and unwrap the potatoes, Cecil,” called Diana gaily, arriving on foot with Miss Wade, and he ran off quite happily.

The men came in soon afterwards, and Diana asked suitable questions, and made suitable comments on their replies.

Rose remained silent until they were all seated at the long table that had been put up in the patch of ground surrounding the cottage. Even in the perturbation of her spirit, she had noticed with relief and pleasure that Charlesbury had chosen the seat next to hers. Cecil was on her other side, interested in his Irish stew.

“I hope you are coming out with us presently,” said Lord Charlesbury. “We’re shooting over the home farm.”

“It’s all on our way back. I’d like to walk there. But I won’t watch the poor things being killed—I think it’s cruel.”

“It does seem a barbaric form of amusement, doesn’t it?” He smiled at her gently, and changed the subject, on which Rose had been prepared to uphold her views vehemently. She talked to him freely throughout the meal and looked forward as a matter of course to walking with him after it was over.

Deliberately, she slackened her pace until they were well behind the others.

“Lord Charlesbury, I want to ask you something.”

She was looking full at him as she spoke, and for an instant caught a fleeting glimpse of something like apprehension in his face. Even as her perceptions registered the look, it vanished, so that she was not even sure if it had really been there.

“I’m sure you have influence with my brother-in-law, with Ford. Will you try and make him leave Cecil to me?”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“You see it’s like this,” she spoke breathlessly. “Ford is Cecil’s guardian. Poor Jim arranged that—he was always doing tiresome things. And, of course, the Aviolets have got the money. I’ve nothing at all, and Jim—naturally—only left debts. So here we are on charity.”

“You can’t call it that—your boy’s own people.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit.” Rose assured him hastily. “At least hardly at all. I wouldn’t mind anything, if it were good for Ces, and of course he’s having splendid advantages here. Isn’t he?”

She looked at him wistfully, as though in sudden needed of reassurance.

“Yes, certainly. He looks such a jolly, happy little chap, too.”

“Well, I think he is. But I—Lord Charlesbury, I don’t want him sent to school.”

He gave a low whistle.

Rose watched him anxiously.

“It would be a dreadful wrench for you—I understand absolutely. It isn’t so very long since I sent my Hugh off, looking such a little fellow too—and, of course, for a mother——”

“Oh, it’s not that!” cried Rose. “You don’t suppose that I’d stand in his way for one moment, if I thought school was going to be the best thing for him! But you see, I don’t.”

“But why not?”

“He’s not like other children. He—he’s got a fault. Poor darling! He doesn’t speak the truth.”

“That is a great pity,” said Charlesbury gravely. “But unfortunately it’s not a very uncommon failing. Children outgrow it.”

Rose suddenly felt that she and this kind, well-bred man, whom she liked so much, were not really talking the same language. He did not despise or condemn, as did the Aviolets, but neither did he understand.

“I don’t think Cecil knows what truth is,” she faltered despondently. “It’s something lacking in him—I don’t even believe that it’s his fault. But it’s dreadful!”

“Poor little fellow! But indeed, if I may say so, I’m quite sure that you’re taking it a great deal too seriously, Mrs. Aviolet. How old is he?”

“Not quite eight.”

“Why, he’s only a baby. You know they say that the age of reason is seven years old, not before. You’ll have broken him of his bad habit long before he has to go to school.”

“If I thought it was only a bad habit—I can’t explain properly, but it seems to me more than that. I can’t get anybody to understand what I mean,” she said confusedly. “It’s like a sort of kink in his mind. And while that’s there, I don’t think he’s fit for school—not any more than if he was physically deformed. They won’t understand him there—I know they won’t.”

“Masters are necessarily men with a wide experience, you know. They are accustomed to deal with every type of boy, after all. Perhaps they may be more understanding than you imagine.”

“Then you think Cecil ought to go to school? You won’t speak to Ford about it?”

There was a sound of pitiful disappointment in her voice. Charlesbury, loyal to the traditions of his caste, yet spoke with quick and sincere compassion.

“Don’t—don’t think that I can’t sympathize with you. I can and do, intensely. Only forgive me if I ask whether you quite realize what a frightful handicap it is for any boy, any English boy, to miss that magnificent public-school training of ours? It’s like nothing else, you know—I mean, there’s no substitute.”

“I suppose not. Most of the men I’ve known haven’t been public-school boys, except, of course, my husband.”

The silence that fell between them made rather too clear their mutual conviction that Jim Aviolet, at least, had been a singularly unfavourable advertisement for the system of education that had produced him.

“What did Jim want, himself, for the boy?”

“I don’t know. He talked about Sir Thomas perhaps offering to pay for his education, but I don’t think he really expected it. In fact I don’t suppose they’d have done it, if Jim had lived. They were pretty well fed up with him,” said Mrs. Aviolet, with her usual inexorable determination that spades should be spades. “Tell me, did Ford hate poor old Jim?”

“They were on very unfriendly terms,” said Lord Charlesbury. “I am afraid there was much jealousy between them. It was never a happy relation.”

“I daresay that’s one reason why Ford is so beastly to me. He always is, you know. He sneers at me, and if I make mistakes—well, when I made mistakes, I suppose I ought to say—he always tries to make it out worse than it is. Oh, he’s hateful!”

“Ford Aviolet always strikes me as a disappointed man,” Lord Charlesbury said reflectively. “He has always just missed things. Although he was not brought up in an intellectual milieu, by any means, he has only just missed being a very clever man. And he has missed a certain popularity that Jim, if I may say so, always obtained whenever he chose to ask for it—especially amongst women. I sometimes think that Ford has resented that. He did well in South Africa, too, but somehow he was passed over, when it came to promotion or decorations. One affects not to care about these things, but I don’t know—I don’t know.”

“I can’t feel a bit sorry for him,” Rose declared. “He’s somehow too contemptuous to seem like a person who has, as you say, just failed. Why doesn’t he marry, and have a son, and then they wouldn’t bother so much about my Cecil.”

Charlesbury turned upon her a gaze that, for all its kindliness, was exceedingly penetrating.

“Do you really wish that?”

She stared back at him.

“Of course. Oh, I see what you mean! But I should hate to think that Cecil would ever have Squires, and be obliged to live there, and do just what the other Aviolets have done before him. I’d rather he made a life for himself.”

“Well done!” He laughed softly.

“Are you laughing at me?” said Rose, offended.

“Indeed I’m not—or only in the way one is allowed to laugh, between friends. I hope you and I are to be friends?”

“Yes,” Rose said directly. “I’d like to be. I haven’t found anybody, in England, that I wanted to be friends with—except Dr. Lucian and his sister. They’ve been very kind to me. As for that Diana creature, that they all talk of as if she was so wonderful, I think she’s too deadly for words. Quite nice, you know, but dull, and extraordinarily stupid.”

Lord Charlesbury carefully displaced his eyeglass before speaking, polished it with a silk handkerchief, and then replaced it.

“As I am to have the pleasure of your friendship, will you allow me to say something very frankly?”

“Yes,” said Rose, wide-eyed.

“I want you to let me have the honour of being the only person to whom you express yourself so very outspokenly about people whom you don’t like. It would be—well, at least unwise, to give your opinion of Diana Grierson-Amberly in quite those words, to someone who might very possibly resent them. You see, English society is quite a small clan, really, isn’t it? And perhaps especially so in the country. It’s a pity to make enemies, after all.”

“Oh!”

“You forgive me for talking like a prig? I’m so much older than you are, and, if you’ll let me say it, so much interested—and so sorry for you.”

“You may well be that,” said Rose Aviolet, with tears in her eyes. “I seem to be always making a fool of myself—if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. But I don’t mind being told by you, because you’re so kind. I’ll try and remember what you said about talking about people.”

“That will be very nice of you. Perhaps you’ll take me for another walk, some day. I should like it very much if you would.”

“I’d like it, too,” said Rose. “You aren’t going away for a few days, are you?”

“I’m afraid I must be off to-morrow. My boy will be home, and I don’t want to miss too much of his holidays. He and I are very great friends, I’m glad to say.”

“Is he like you?”

“No, I don’t think so. One of these days I hope you’ll see him, Mrs. Aviolet. I should like you to bring Cecil over to Charlesbury, and let the two little lads make friends.”

“Thank you very much. I often wish Ces had more to do with other children. I think it would be good for him.”

“One does feel that, with an only child. Hugh has improved in every possible way since he’s been with other boys.”

“At school, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Rose received the reply in silence. She was far too grateful for Charlesbury’s evident liking and sympathy for herself to retort with her habitual assertion that generalities which might apply to other children did not apply to Cecil. Moreover, her shrewdness had quite well perceived that Lord Charlesbury had avoided committing himself to any promise of interference between herself and Ford. After all, he was Ford’s friend, Rose reflected, liking him none the less on that account, although still marvelling somewhat that it should be so.

She was sorry when they came into the home farm and her walk with Charlesbury was over.

The men, spread out in a thin line, began to walk up the steep slope of the first field, Diana Grierson-Amberly walking beside Ford, looking very trim and efficient in her short, brown tweed coat and skirt and close-fitting hat.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to walk with them, Rose?” her mother-in-law asked her, from the pony-carriage in the lane.

“Quite sure, thank you,” Rose said, shuddering, and as a bird rose suddenly and the first shot went off, she uttered a loud and startling scream.

Ford’s head was turned, for a searing moment, in her direction.

“Get in quickly,” said Lady Aviolet.

Her tone was one of forbearance.

“Where’s Ces?”

“He is walking home with Miss Wade. I hope you don’t think it will be too far for him?”

“Oh, no, it won’t hurt him.”

They often deferred thus, politely, to one another’s judgment in matters concerning Cecil, Lady Aviolet from a conscientious desire to respect the rights of motherhood, and Rose from some strange, elementary idea of diplomacy.

“Laurence Charlesbury is a particularly charming person, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do.” Rose’s reply was emphatic, after her fashion.

“We have known him for many years, and I am particularly fond of him.”

“What was his wife like?”

“She had a good deal of foreign blood in her, I believe, but otherwise she was delightful. She was only twenty-four when she died. Such a pretty creature, too.”

“What was her name?” Rose asked abruptly. She was conscious of an impelling curiosity.

“Mona le Breton. Her father was the well-known polo-player, you know.”

Rose, of course, did not know, and was a good deal more interested in trying to obtain some glimpse of the personality that had lain behind the romantic name.

Lady Aviolet, however, possessed no talent for transmitting such impressions.

“They were only married two years. She died when her baby was born, poor thing!”

“Were they very happy together?”

“I believe it was a very happy marriage. He was devoted to her, poor man. Everyone thought he was sure to marry again, if only for the poor little boy’s sake, but he has never shown any signs of doing so.”

“It must have been dreadful for him, losing her. What was she like?”

“She was very pretty,” repeated Lady Aviolet, a little helplessly. “Tall and slim, with brown, curly hair and very dark blue eyes. Quite an unusual type, in fact.”

“What else?”

“How do you mean, my dear? She wasn’t clever, or anything like that, so far as I know. Lady Cowderham was her aunt, and used to take her about before she married. She was the same age as Lady Cowderham’s own girl, who afterwards married one of the Troyles of Lawley—the second son, I think it was.”

They had got back to names and categories again. Rose ceased to feel any interest in what her companion was saying, and therefore, after her wont, ceased to pay any attention to it. Lady Aviolet, naturally, was not thereby encouraged to proceed with her observations and they drove on for a time in silence.

Rose felt pleased and excited by the idea of her friendship with Laurence Charlesbury. She found him attractive, and she had been long enough removed from admiration to welcome it with passionate eagerness.

She heartily wished that Lord Charlesbury were not going away on the morrow, to leave Squires once more intolerable to her.

“Is Lord Charlesbury obliged to go away to-morrow?” she suddenly demanded with great abruptness.

“I suppose so. It’s certainly a pity, but I hope we shall see him again one of these days. He generally comes over once or twice every year.”

“It’s been a very short visit,” said Rose disconsolately.

“It’s not been like a regular shooting-party at all, I’m afraid, my dear. Another year we shall do rather more entertaining, I hope, but, naturally, it was out of the question for us all, just now. However, Diana is staying on for a day or two, I’m glad to say. She’s always so bright.”

“Is she?” said Rose, and then remembered her conversation with Charlesbury, and added in a determined sort of way: “She’s nice and willing, isn’t she? Does she enjoy herself a lot in London?”

“Her mother is very strict about only allowing her a certain number of late nights in the week. But she has a good deal of going out, on the whole, and I’m told that she is a great success everywhere. Men always like her so much.”

Rose felt very much surprised to hear it, but hoped that her silence might be taken as a tribute to the indisputability of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s charms.

“I hope you and she will make friends, my dear. I feel that you have very little companionship of your own age, amongst us all.”

Rose was acutely touched, as she always was by any kindness.

“It is very good of you. I’m afraid you think I’m an ungrateful pig, sometimes——”

Alarm was latent in Lady Aviolet’s grey, obtuse eyes. It crept there, slowly, because all her reactions were slow, but always quite unmistakably, at the introduction of a personal note in conversation. Emotional outbursts, such as Rose was addicted to, she very evidently viewed as indiscretions that only too surely classified their perpetrators.

“My dear—please.... Hark! Can you hear the guns? They must be doing very well.”

“Damn the guns,” said Rose without malice, only resenting her rebuff.

Lady Aviolet slightly drew down her already lengthy upper lip and said nothing whatever.

“I didn’t mean it! It was frightfully rude of me—please forgive me!”

“Don’t, my dear, don’t upset yourself, please. That expression doesn’t sound nice on any one’s lips, but especially not on those of a woman. The use of it is a bad habit, and I’m told it’s very much on the increase—a pity, I think. One knows that no irreverence is intended, but one dislikes hearing such a word at all.”

The fastidious distaste in the elder lady’s voice was quite impersonal, and caused Rose to feel herself relegated to some more than ever remote distance from the world in which the Aviolet standards prevailed.

Her mother-in-law, with deliberate obviousness, changed the subject.

“Ford has probably told you that he is going to talk to Laurence Charlesbury about Hurst, Hugh’s preparatory school. He thinks it might do very well for Cecil, and it would be nice to feel that the little chap would find a friend there. Hugh is a particularly nice boy.”

“And where do I come in?”

Lady Aviolet looked her interrogation at the truculence that had suddenly sprung into Rose’s voice.

“Ford this, and Ford that. Ces is my kid, and I think I ought to be consulted, if there’s going to be talk about where he’s going to, and all the rest of it.”

“I don’t know what you mean, my dear. Ford will talk it all over with you before anything is settled, naturally. Here we are! Now do go and rest quietly in your own room till tea-time. I’m sure you’re tired.”

Rose understood only too well that this forbearing epithet was applied to what she herself ruefully stigmatized as her own crossness. She felt herself, indeed, to be in a strangely restless mood, and disinclined in the extreme to follow Lady Aviolet’s advice and rest.

Instead, she threw off her hat, with its detested little black veil, the moment she reached her room, and stared earnestly at herself in the glass.

Even to her own perceptions, it was an innocent, almost child-like face that gazed back at her, in spite of her big frame and the very patent artificial colour on her full lips.

“I certainly don’t look twenty-five,” she reflected with satisfaction.

Her yellow hair fell in loose strands across her forehead and temples, and she pushed it back impatiently. That unusual corn-colour was an asset, especially with brown eyes and dark lashes, but she had always longed for curly hair. To-day, she thought that she would like to have had brown curly hair, and dark blue eyes, and to have been slim, as well as tall.

“I bet I weigh all of eleven stone,” she murmured disgustedly, her eyes travelling across the square breadth of her fine shoulders and the deep, full curves of her breast.

“And my weight’ll go up every day in this place, with the meals they have and never anything to do worth doing!”

She revolved in her own mind, as often before, foolish and unpractical plans for maintaining herself and Cecil independently of Aviolet assistance. But she knew too much of poverty to take her own flights of fancy seriously. Cecil should have all that the Aviolets could give him.

She held, however, the gifts of their bestowal to be confined within the limits of the material. For the things of the spirit, she was convinced that Cecil had only herself to look to, and the thought added weight to her blind determination of trusting to her own instinct rather than to Ford’s specious logic.

“Perhaps, after all, Lord Charlesbury will say something to Ford,” she thought. “I believe he’d help me if he could.”

The dimple deepened at the corner of her mouth and she smiled, with a curious pleasure at the thought.

Lord Charlesbury did not tell her whether he had spoken to Ford, but he talked to her most of the evening, and the exhilarating conviction of his liking increased in her. She even became rather exuberant in her triumphant consciousness of success, and her manner to Diana Grierson-Amberly took on an unconstraint that hitherto she had been unable to afford.

But at the foot of the stairs, when Charlesbury handed her a lighted candle, he said: “Good-night, and good-bye, I’m afraid. I shall be off early to-morrow morning.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

He smiled at her.

“So am I. You won’t forget that you’re coming to visit Charlesbury and bringing the boy?”

“Oh, no, I shan’t forget,” she assured him seriously.

Shaking hands, he detained hers in his for a moment before releasing it.