“’Twould be a presuming fellow,” he mused, “that would dare to try his gallant ways with such an one, and if he did, I would back my young milliner to teach him a lesson.”
She told him how she had, so to speak, graduated in Paris, which accounted, thought he, for a taste that was scarcely indigenous. And her home was between Canterbury and Dover, and she, brought up till seventeen on the farm, the eldest of eleven. Then he knew whence she had drawn that sap of splendid vigour; a hardy flower of English soil. And the chief of his many prides being that he was an Englishman, he was still better content.
She would alight, she told him, at “The Rose” at Canterbury, where she would lie the night. And father would fetch her in the morning; for ’twas mortal cold across the downs on a winter’s evening, and ’twas a long drive for the mare even in good weather.
“Bravo,” said he. “I, too, halt at ‘The Rose,’ I am glad to know that I shall have such good company. May I sit beside you at supper in the eating-room, my dear young lady?”
“Oh, you’re vastly obliging, sir!” said Pamela Pounce, and a faint pink crept, like the colour of a shell, into her smooth, pale cheek, for she had a good eye for a gentleman, and she knew that she was honoured.
Her tongue ran on gaily, and he listened with a gentle air of courtesy and an interest which in truth was not assumed.
In spite of her sophisticated manner her chatter was very artless. It was a revelation of a character which had remained curiously untouched by the world. The busy mart in which she lived had cast none of its dust upon her soul.
Dear, to be sure, how prodigious joyful they would be at home to see her back!
“Four years, sir, think on it! I was but a child when I left them, and now I’m a woman!” ’Twas like, indeed, that none would recognise her again, should they just happen to meet, accidental like. She half wished she could have walked in upon them and taken them by surprise. But then: “Father, sir, would ha’ lost the pleasure of coming to fetch me,” and her mother might have been vexed. “Mother’s very house-proud, sir. She’d want to have things pretty for me, and bake cakes and that.”
And they’d all be looking out for her on the house step. Just to think of their dear faces fair turned her silly. She blinked away a tear and gave her bright smile. But as he smiled back it was with a certain melancholy. The farmer with his eleven children—poor, struggling fellow!—the hardworked mother, the good, industrious child, returning home with her hands full of gifts, blessed in her honest toil for them, were they not all about to taste joys from which he had deliberately cut himself off in his fastidious isolation? He had scarcely ever regretted his chosen solitariness. His beautiful old shabby home, set in the loneliness of the snowy park, the wood fire in the library in the company of a favourite book, the ministrations of a couple of well-drilled servants, an austere silence, a harmonious communion with the high spirits of the dead; that was the Christmas to which he himself had looked forward with complacency. Now he wondered; his heart contracted with a most unusual sense of pain; had he lost the best in life? If he had had a daughter by his shoulder with a white, pure forehead such as this girl had, and had seen her eyes fire with love, heard her voice tremble at the thought of meeting him, her old father, would not that have brought him a sweetness finer than the most exquisite page in Virgil?