"How's the boy?" asked Mostyn, stretching himself and yawning, but half awake.
"Nicely, thank you, sir." Willis drew a breath of relief. No doubt he had expected to be taken severely to task for not having revealed to his master the fact of Rada Armitage's frequent occupation of the Grange, a trespass which he had palpably condoned. "Miss Rada's been very good to him, pore lad, and is goin' to send him some books to read. Reads a treat, does our Jim." Willis spoke Miss Armitage's name as though to give the necessary opening for explanations. And these were immediately demanded by Mostyn, who woke up completely at the mention of the girl's name.
The explanation was as Rada had hinted. Her appearance had not been looked for since she had slept at the Grange the night before, and had never yet spent two consecutive nights there. Willis meant to have taken the earliest opportunity of warning her that the Grange was no longer unoccupied; he had thought it would not be necessary to mention the matter to Mr. Clithero at all. As for the clothes in the cupboard, he had quite forgotten all about them, and he had thought that the roses in the vases had been left from overnight. He was very penitent, as was his wife, and they both hoped the matter would be overlooked.
Mostyn took it all as a joke, much to the gardener's relief. It was a perfect June morning: the sun shone in at the latticed window, bearing the scent of roses and jasmine, and he felt that he had awakened to a new day, a new life. How different this was to his dingy London lodgings! How different, even, to the pretentious gloom of his father's house! Yet everything about him was his own, absolutely his own! The blood coursed quickly through his veins. How could he be angry with Willis?
Mostyn proceeded to put some questions as to Rada. The girl's name came glibly to his lips. A desire had come upon him, born, no doubt, partly of that strange fascination which she exerted and partly of the revelation of his own masculine power which had followed her fear of an indefinite danger, to master the little vixen, as he mentally described her, to curb and break her in as an untrained filly—he was already beginning to use sporting metaphor, even to himself.
But Willis, who appeared very ready to discuss Rada, almost took Mostyn's breath away by his first statement.
"She's a hangel!" he said emphatically.
"A what?" Mostyn had regarded Rada in anything but an angelic light.
"A hangel," repeated the gardener, laying great stress on the aspirate. He proceeded to sing Rada's praises with evident enjoyment, and palpably from a sense of conviction. She was, it appeared, although as poor as a church mouse, the Lady Bountiful to all the cottage folk in the neighbourhood, by whom she was simply adored. She would minister comforts to the sick and needy, often little more than a cheerful word and the sunlight of her presence, but no less welcome for all that. She would take charge of unruly children and attend to the house-keeping in the unavoidable absence of the mother; she would cook little dainties with her own hands; she had an extraordinary capacity for lulling restless babies to sleep. Willis declared stoutly that she had pulled his own little daughter through a fever when the doctor had been despondent, and she was not afraid of infection either, he added proudly.
Here, indeed, was Rada in a new light! What a queer and complex little creature she must be! She had treated him with such shocking rudeness: he had thought her the very contrary to the "hangel" described by Willis, but now it was evident that there were depths in the girl's nature which had not yet been revealed to him.