"Oh, I shall," said Mrs. Graham. "Perhaps she will dance for me. I liked her immensely. She was certainly beautiful, and I like beauty. She was quite young too. She can't be very old now."
"What I want to know is what brings her to Blaythorn," said the Squire, which closed the discussion, for Cicely's carriage was announced at that moment, and the welfare of the Mountfield horses being of paramount importance it was not many minutes before she and Mrs. Graham had driven away.
Dick returned shortly after six o'clock, and when he had changed his clothes, came into the library where his father was sitting at his big writing-table looking over papers, his gold-rimmed glasses perched on his straight nose.
"Oh, here you are," he said, looking over them at his son. "I say, what's this about Lady George Dubec taking the rectory at Blaythorn?"
Dick took a cigarette out of his case and went over to the smoking-table by the fire to get a match. "I've just been to see her," he said; "she's a friend of mine."
"Well, but——" The Squire was puzzled, vaguely uneasy, though he could not have told why. "What on earth has she come here for? Who brought her? You didn't, I suppose?"
Dick sat down with rather elaborate unconcern in one of the big easy-chairs facing his father, who had turned round sideways in his seat. "I suppose you may say I did bring her, in a way," he said. "She wanted to do a bit of mild hunting somewhere, and I told her she'd better try the South Meadshire."
"But they tell me she's well known with the Quorn and all that sort of thing."
"Now I should like to know who told you that," said Dick to himself, but he did not ask. "She hasn't hunted there for two seasons," he said. "She wanted something a bit quieter. I said I'd see if I could find her a smallish house, and I wrote to Wylie, the agent at Bathgate. Blaythorn Rectory was the only place he could get hold of, and the stables there aren't much."
"I should think not."