“Any answer?” asked the wall-eyed man.
Taffy could not say. The man took the letter and went to inquire, leaving him alone with the dogs.
It seemed an age before he reappeared, having in the interval slipped a dirty livery coat over his yellow waistcoat. “The Squire says you’re to come in.” Taffy and the dogs poured together into a high, stone-flagged hall; then through a larger hall and a long dark corridor. The footman’s coat, for want of a loop, had been hitched on a peg by its collar, and stuck out behind his neck in the most ludicrous manner; but he shuffled ahead so fast that Taffy, tripping and stumbling among the dogs, had barely time to observe this before a door was flung open and he stood blinking in a large room full of sunlight.
“Hallo! Here’s the parson’s bantam!”
The room had four high, bare windows through which the afternoon sunshine streamed on the carpet. The carpet had a pattern of pink peonies on a delicate buff ground, and was shamefully dirty. And the vast apartment, with its white paint and gilding and Italian sketches in water-colour and statuettes under glass, might have been a lady’s drawing-room. But paint and gilding were tarnished; the chintz chair-covers soiled and torn; the pictures hung askew; and a smell of dog filled the air.
Squire Moyle sat huddled in a deep chair beside the fire-place, facing the middle of the room, where a handsome, high-complexioned gentleman, somewhat past middle age, lounged on a settee and dangled a gold-mounted riding crop. A handsome boy knelt at the back of the settee and leaned over the handsome gentleman’s shoulder. On the floor, between the two men, lay a canvas bag; and something moved inside it. At the end of the room, by the farthest window, Honoria knelt over a big portfolio. She wore the grey frock and pink sash which Taffy had seen in church that morning, and she tossed her dark hair back from her eyes as she looked up.
The Squire crumpled up the letter in his hand.
“Put the bag away,” he said to the handsome gentleman. “’Tis Sunday, I tell ’ee, and Parson will be here in an hour. This is young six-foot I was telling about.” He turned to Taffy—
“Boy, go and shake hands with Sir Harry Vyell.”
Taffy did as he was bidden. “This is my son George,” said Sir Harry; and Taffy shook hands with him, too, and liked his face.