“That will be your place,” he answered. “Pray be ready to receive my guests with me.”
She raised her eyes, startled, indeterminate.
“I and my frocks are poor company for great ladies,” she said with a scornful dimple.
At that he smiled as one smiles upon a child.
“You have a certain grey gown,” he said. And, after a little pause, he added: “Some of those roses.”
The fragrance of them had come over to him as they moved with her breath. Once more she hesitated for a second, then dropping her eyelids, she said, with mock humility:
“It shall be as you order,” and went up the stairs with head erect and steady step, feeling that his gaze was following her.
She could hardly have explained to herself why this attitude of David’s, this sudden proof of his strength in forcing himself to become like other people, should cause her so much resentment and so much pain. But she felt that this man of the world was infinitely far removed from the absent star-gazer, from the neglected recluse who had so needed her ministrations. The rôles seemed reversed. It was no longer she who was the protector, the power directing events, no longer she who ruled by right of wisdom and sweet common sense. David had become independent of her. Hardest thing of all, to be no longer indispensable to him! And yet even in this unexpected cup of bitterness there was a redeeming sweet: he had remembered her grey gown, he had noticed that the roses became her.
My Lady Lochore arrived towards that falling hour of the day when the shadows are growing long and soft, when the slanting light is amber: it might be called the coloured hour, for the sun begins to veil its splendour, so that eyes, undazzled, may rejoice. The swallows were dipping across the sward of golden-emerald and Bindon stood proudly golden-grey in the light, silver-grey in the shadows and against the blue.
This daughter of the house came back to it with a fine clatter of horses and a blasting of post horns; followed by a retinue of valets and maids; acclaimed along the village street by shouting children, while aged gaffers and gammers bobbed on their cottage door-steps and showered interested blessings. (Margery had prepared that ground in good time.) She was welcomed in stately fashion by the chief servants and the master of the house himself on the threshold of her old home.