We walked for a good two miles down a lane branching off, under trees, from the road to our farm; we came at last to a white gate and then up a drive bordered with tall flowers that flourished as they chose in the long grass. The house—which had one of those interminable Welsh names beginning with "Dol"—was long and white, striped green by creepers, and with a wide porch garlanded with heavy-headed roses.
Just to the right of the porch a long window-box filled with black pansies stood in front of an open upper window. A girl's rosy face and wavy hair peeped out; it was the daughter of the house who called to us in a voice which, though pleasant, would have made her fortune as a pilot on the Mersey, "A-hoy! How d'you do? ... Syb—il! Here are your friends! ... Come in, will you? Don't stop to ring; it doesn't."
Elizabeth and I went straight into the cool, shady hall, and into the midst of one of the most welcoming and hospitable, the least conventional homes that I have ever entered.
We were greeted by Sybil's employers, the master and mistress of the house. He, an old soldier, wearing the hearthrug-like tweeds and the mossy stockings of a country squire of that neighbourhood; she a plump and still pretty woman in spotted black and white muslin, with wavy hair like her daughter's grown grey, and with an egg-basket which she never put down, over her arm. He and she seldom stopped talking, always talked at once; generally in the form of questions.
Thus—
"My dears, won't you come and sit down? Did you walk all the way from Careg? Aren't you tired?"
"Does Miss Sybil know these young ladies have come, Mother? Can't we have some tea for them at once?"
"One of you is engaged to that friend of our friend, Captain Holiday's; is it you? No? You? Isn't that very nice? Will it be a long engage——"
"Where's Miss Sybil?" (Enter from the back our friend Sybil, smiling, but unable to get a word in.) "Now, where's Vera, where's that girl Violet——"
Violet (the daughter of the house) came running down to add her voice to this family anthem.