"I wonder what Reardon's doing now?" Jeffrey asked.
But his father did not know.
Jeffrey finished rapidly, and then leaned back in his chair, looked out of the window and forgot them all. Lydia felt one of her disproportioned indignations. She was afraid the colonel was not going to have the beautiful time with him their hopes had builded. The colonel looked older still than he had an hour ago.
"What shall we do, my son?" he asked. "Go for a walk—in the orchard?"
A walk in the street suddenly occurred to him as the wrong thing to offer a man returned to the battery of curious eyes.
"If you like," said Jeffrey indifferently. "Do you take one after breakfast?"
He spoke as if it were entirely for his father, and Anne and Lydia wondered, Anne in her kind way and the other hotly, how he could forget that all their passionate interests were for him alone.
"Not necessarily," said the colonel. They were rising. "I was thinking of you—my son."
"What makes you call me that?" Jeffrey asked curiously.
They were in the hall now, looking out beyond the great sun patch on the floor, to the lilac trees.