"But you will come with me after lunch," said John Spence, with a trifle of anxiety.
"All right," she threw over her shoulder.
They walked over a field of roots. A single bird got up some little distance away and flew parallel to the line. Spence snapped it off neatly. "I'm going to shoot well to-day," he said with satisfaction. "I like a gallery, you know, Joan. I say, Nancy's not annoyed about anything, is she?"
"Not that I know of. Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. I thought she seemed as if she didn't much want to come with me."
"You see we're grown up now," said Joan. "We can't seize you by the arm, as we used to do, and see which can pull hardest. We have to wait till you ask us."
They had come to a high, rather blind fence, and the line had spread out, and was waiting. Joan and John Spence were practically alone, except for Spence's wise and calm retriever.
He looked down at her with the kind elder brotherly smile which, with his frank and simple appreciation of their humours, had so endeared him to the twins. "I say, that's awful rot, you know," he said.
Joan was conscious of pleasure and some relief as she met his eyes. She wanted nothing more than that things should be between the three of them as they had always been. She had come to think that perhaps, after all, Nancy wanted nothing more, either; but she did not know, because they had not talked about John Spence together lately. If this visit should show him to be what he had always been, they would talk about him together again, and perhaps that was what she wanted at the moment more than anything; for it was a source of discomfort to her that there was a subject taboo between Nancy and herself.
"It may be sad," she said. "But it isn't rot. We are grown up, and there is no getting over it."