“I thought it was some mistake of the servant’s,” she said stiffly.
Violet pulled her father out of the French window. “Come, we have only time for half a game now,” she said.
Mrs. North followed.
“Your Miss Seer is coming this afternoon, Roger,” she said. “I do hope you won’t talk to no one else, if you intend to appear at all. It looks so bad, and only makes everyone talk!”
With which parting shot she retreated towards Mansfield and the chairs.
Violet slipped her arm through her father’s as they crossed the lawn. “She can’t help it, daddy,” she said soothingly.
North laughed, a short mirthless laugh.
“I suppose not. Go ahead, Vi. I’ll take blue.”
They buried themselves in the game after the complete and concentrated manner of the real croquet player. Both were above the average, and it was an infinite relief to North to find Violet taking her old absorbing interest in his defeat.
Presently Fred Riversley wandered out and stood watching them, stolid and heavy as usual, but his nod to North held meaning, and a great content. North was beginning to like this rather dull young man in a way he would once have thought impossible. He had been the plainest, the least attractive, and the least interesting of the group of brilliant children who had grown up in such a bewilderingly sudden way, almost, it seemed, on the declaration of war, and of whom so few were left. North’s mind drifted back to those days which seemed so long ago, another lifetime, to those gay glad children who had centred round his friend and so been part of his own life. And then a sudden nostalgia seized him, a sick sense of the purposeless horror of life. And you cared—really cared—if you made a bad shot at croquet, or if your wife objected to your sucking oranges. Mansfield, who had faced death by torture minute after minute out there, was worried because he could not arrange the chairs at a tennis party. And those boys and the girl, little Sybil Rawson, were all broken up, smashed out of existence, finished. They had not even left any other boys and girls of their own behind; they were some of nature’s waste.