“And what is the pleasant house?” she inquired of them, when, after their walk along the hilltop, they had crossed the wood and emerged again upon the common.
It stood, with an air of serenity and detachment, half a mile away, a tall house of pale, eighteenth-century brick with a white door and white window-sills, a formal garden before it and a neat hedge dividing it from the road. One felt that the woods had grown up around it and that it preserved a tranquil personality of its own, unmoved by the haphazard accretions of a century.
“Oh, that’s the Rectory; where Toppie lives,” said Ruth. “You can see the church spire just above the trees to the right. Pleasant, do you call it? I think it’s rather dismal; so bare and square. It needs lots of creepers and shrubberies to make it cheerful; but old Mr. Westmacott doesn’t like them.”
“Creepers would not be in the character of that house, I feel,” said Alix; “and they would hide the pretty colour of the brick. There are a few roses, too, are there not?”
“Yes; a few. Toppie would have her roses. I hate a house without creepers.”
“Shall I soon see Toppie, do you think?”
“Oh, you’ll see her soon, all right,” said Ruth. “She’ll be coming in to tea to-day, probably.”
“I know she’s coming,” said Rosemary. “She asked me yesterday if Alix would be here, and when I told her we’d had the wire, she said she’d come. I think she’s rather keen on seeing you, Alix. Owen wrote a lot about you, you see.”
They spoke without any emotion of Toppie. They took her for granted. She was not, to them, a shrine. But even before the scene in the train with Giles, Alix had had a special feeling about Toppie herself, and as she walked on with the chattering girls her mind went back to the day at Cannes when Captain Owen had first showed her and Maman Toppie’s photograph. He carried the little leather case in his breast-pocket, his mother’s picture on one side and hers on the other, and Maman had said, as she took the case from him and looked: “Elle est tout-à-fait ravissante.”
“You don’t see very much of her in that,” said Captain Owen, wagging his foot a little, and Alix guessed that he was moved in speaking of his fiancée. “But it does show something. Lovely the shape of her face, isn’t it? She’s not exactly beautiful.”