"Thank you," said the officer referred to. "Always grateful for small mercies." He looked at his watch, and lounged off towards the stairway. "I'm going to shift for dinner." At the first landing he paused and looked back. "By the way, Emily," he said, "have they accepted?"
"Who?" asked Lady Manners, her head once more full of the affairs of the about-to-be-repatriated.
"Those children."
"No. If a letter comes you had better open it, and let Mrs. Mackworth know if they are coming."
"I will," said Graeme. "But, oh, who wouldn't sell his little farm and go to sea!"
3
Cornelius James claimed the right to be the bearer of the acceptance to Lady Manners' invitation by virtue of having been the first to discover Graeme.
Georgina, doomed to an hour's violin practice, was immured in the stuffy farm parlour amid waxen fruit, daguerreotype portraits and family Bibles. Jane, after a spirited bid for the post of messenger, sought consolation in the region of the sheep-dip, speedily becoming as excited and almost as wet as the struggling animals themselves. Miss Mayne, having borrowed an iron from the farmer's wife, retired to the sitting-room, where, with pretty brows knit in the preoccupation of blanchissage, she was no longer a governess, but a slim priestess before a vestal altar, aloof, mysterious.
Cornelius James, turning his back on these feminine activities, pursued a stony lane that climbed through sloping fields and presently debouched upon the main road. The lodge gates of his destination stood a few hundred yards higher up, but boylike he disdained so formal an entrance, and nosed along the high palisade surrounding the park until a displaced board gave him access.
The trees grew thick and untended as in a wilderness, with moss clinging to their bark and the verdure wellnigh shutting out the sky. Underfoot the dead leaves of countless autumns' garnering rustled crisply and, as the boy advanced, twigs snapped at every step; something startled by his footfall bounded away through the fern unseen. To the ears of boyhood, Pan's pipe has not grown dim, and it was with a heart that thumped responsive that Cornelius James crept forward.