CHAPTER II
A QUESTION OF MATRIMONY
Dick Clinton, the eldest son, arrived at Kencote at a quarter to eight, and went straight up to his room to dress. This young man—for, with his spare, upright frame, sleek head, and well-fitting clothes, he looked less than his thirty-four years—was as well served as his father, although he did not get his will by the same means; and the little wrongs of life, each of which the Squire, as they came along, dealt with as "a most infernal nuisance," he took more equably. He had brought his own servant with him, but had no need of him for the time, for his evening clothes were laid out for him, his shirt, with studs in and a collar attached, was hung over the back of a chair in front of the piled-up fire, and he had only to slip out of one suit and into another as if he had been in the house all day instead of having just reached the end of a journey of over three hours. These things were all a matter of course to him. The warm bright room, red-curtained, and quiet from the deep stillness of the country, gave him no particular sensation of pleasure when he entered it, except that he was cold from his journey and there was a good fire; nor, consciously, did the fact that this was his home, which he liked better than any other place, although he was more often than not away from it. He was thinking, as he began immediately in his quick neat way to change his clothes, that there was no apparent sign of the frost yielding, and fighting off his annoyance—for he hated to feel annoyed—at the stoppage of the morrow's hunting. He had very much wanted to hunt on the morrow, more than he usually wanted anything.
And yet he was, though he hardly knew it, pleased to be at home, and in this room, which had been his ever since he had left the nursery. The little iron bedstead was the one on which he had slept as a boy; the flat tin bath, standing against a wall with the bath-mat hung over it, was only rather the worse for wear since those days; the worn carpet, now more worn, was the same; and the nondescript paper on the walls, which were hung with photographs of his "house" at Eton, showing him amongst the rest in five stages, from the little fair-haired boy in his broad collar sitting cross-legged on the grass, to the young man with folded arms in a place of honour by his tutor. There were later Cambridge groups too, exhibiting him as Master of the Drag, in the eighteenth-century dress of the True Blue Club, and in other conjunctures of pursuits and companions, but nothing to mark a later date than his University days, unless it were the big photographs in silver or tortoise-shell frames on the mantelpiece and writing-table. Probably nothing had been added to the decoration of the room for a dozen years, only a few things for use—a larger wardrobe and dressing-table from another room in the house, a big easy-chair, a fur rug by the bed. The room contained everything he needed in such a room, and since he needed nothing there to please the eye, it had received nothing all these years, and would receive nothing until he should leave it for good, when he should be no longer the eldest son, but in his turn the head of the house.
He had nearly finished dressing when there was a knock at the door, and a voice, "Are you there, Dick? Can we come in?"
His rather expressionless face changed a little, pleasantly. "Yes, come along," he called out, and his young sisters came in in their fresh muslin frocks, their masses of fair hair tied back with big blue ribbons. They had that prim air of being dressed, which is different in the case of girls not quite grown up from that of their elder sisters. They were remarkably alike and remarkably pretty, and Dick, who stood at the dressing-table in his shirt sleeves tying his tie, although he did not turn round to greet them, noticed their appearance with approval through the glass.
"Well, Twankies," he said affably, as they went up to the mantelpiece and stood one on either side of the fire, "what's the news with you?"
"We are to have a new preceptress," said Joan, the elder, "vice the old Starling, seconded for service elsewhere."
Dick turned and stared at her. "Old Miss Bird leaving!" he exclaimed. "Surely not!"