He wondered, sailor-like, what manner of man her brother had been, that dead Guardsman who slept "in Flanders' fields." He realised with an unfamiliar thrill the fearless, frank way she had looked him in the eyes, the poise of her head, the gay quality of her laugh, and somehow wished he had had that man for a pal; he, who since boyhood had never really opened his heart to another human being.
He found a letter from his step-sister awaiting him on his return. It was a hurried epistle communicating the fact that Sir Malcolm was in bed with influenza, which at that time was raging in London. It postponed their return indefinitely and bade Graeme make himself as comfortable as circumstances permitted in their absence until the end of his leave.
Perhaps nothing more was necessary than this absence of Lady Manners from the scene to mature Graeme's friendship with his new acquaintances.
From the formal invitation to a return party at Glebe Farm penned by Georgina and signed by all three children, they passed by rapid stages to an easy comradeship. In a week the boy and both girls were as free of the demesne as Graeme was of the noisy teas in the farm parlour. Further, the latter unearthed a governess cart out of the stables, and harnessing a fat pony between the shafts, led them off on long rambling expeditions amongst the thickly-wooded hills, and lanes drowsy with the scent of honeysuckle.
It is not for me to attempt any convincing record of the imperceptible stages by which, as the days passed, Graeme fell in love with Claire Mayne.
She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out.
There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment.
However, as time went on, one after another he drew forth timidly from the secret hiding-place of his soul some fresh idealism; draping them about his conception of her, until the real and the imaginary woman blended into that dear, everlastingly inaccessible unreality which is all mankind's first love.
Transports of this nature are usually apparent enough in the demeanour; but Graeme Jakes's oriental imperturbability of countenance gave not the slightest betrayal of the turmoil in his thoughts.
Claire Mayne herself remained serenely unconscious of anything in the air more vibrant than a grave friendliness and a shy, half-reluctant admiration. She would not have been the normal, healthy young woman she was had she not thought about him a good deal. When the children were in bed and the stars made visible the dark outline of the hills opposite, she sat by her open window, with the tiny room behind her in darkness; there, chin in hand, she tried to assign him to some known category amongst her limited male acquaintances, and found the task difficult.