Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened stone with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest.
“And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure, will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in books, I suppose. Is he writing?”
“Yes. He is well.”
“He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr. Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it last night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now.”
Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing.
“So,” Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly—her niece had the faculty of disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs—“So it will be nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I thought that he would see or hear me.”
Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the afternoon’s balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his sister-in-law, had lured him from his studies.
He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair haloed a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely aquiline, the lips full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing of his own impressions; his cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous. Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering green neck-tie, a Panama hat, placed at the back of his head with a certain recklessness, carried out the impression of ease and of indifference.
“Ah! Kate,” he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large, white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.
“You and Felicia are coming to me for a week,” she said, again flicking her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. “I mustn’t let you get rusty up here.”