Then I came back again.
I took the shadiest hat I’ve got out of its drawer and pulled it down firmly over my hair, stabbing it on with my swastika hatpin, my hand-wrought silver one that Sydney designed for me, my two mounted regimental buttons of father’s, and my little pearl-headed one. I daresay my head did look all bristling with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty’s. But if I’d had more pins I’d have stuck them all in! And even if I do, like Blanche and Theo, usually go about hatless in the gardens, I was going to use all the “cover” I could to meet the Governor’s apology, whatever it might be. For now he was going to have his work cut out for him! And whatever he began to say about last night’s brusque, snatched kiss, I wasn’t going to help him out by one syllable. I could wait. Let him explain; floundering about for words, probably, as he hasn’t floundered yet! Feeling most satisfactorily composed myself, I came down the stairs. One of the maids, in china-blue print, moved aside a dust-pan for me to pass.
Then I saw something that ruffled me again.
In that dust-pan there was a handful of pink, crystallized rose-leaves and a couple of tiny silver horseshoes—Theodora’s “confetti!” It must have dropped out of the draping of my skirt as I rushed upstairs—was there no getting away from last night?—and I know that there was something more than well-trained civility in that girl’s smiling “Good morning, Miss Nancy!”
Why can’t they say “Miss Trant”? Do they consider it isn’t worth while for so short a time, as they think?—Hateful household!
I had only just unruffled myself again as I faced the Governor in the sunshine outside.
“Come in here, won’t you?” he said, holding open the little white gate under the rambler arch of the rose-garden.
It was just then a bouquet of warm, scented colour, shading down from the deepest damask of the bed of Jeune Amours, through the rosy, straggling Baroness von Ulks and the faintly-flushed Cuisses des Nymphes to the dead-white Frau Karl Druschkis—such a rose-garden, such an earthly paradise for a before-breakfast stroll—alone!
Side by side we paced slowly down to the end of the box-bordered path between the pink Maman Cochets (another echo of last night!) before another word was said.
Then he began. “I wanted to have this opportunity of saying something to you.”