Another figure came forward to meet me. This—his mother? A startling contrast indeed to what I’d pictured her. She was dressed in the soft, lacy, unshaped black that best suits an elderly lady; and her soft, puffed-out hair was grey all over. But that was as far as the “elderliness” of the Governor’s mother went. Her figure was as tall and seemed nearly as slender as Blanche’s; she had the long-armed, free movements that I’ve heard my father praise in Miss Ellen Terry; her face was pink and irregular-featured and mobile, her expression shy and smiling. She seemed like some girl who had fallen into a trance in the “Eighties,” from which she had just woken up to find that her hair was no longer brown, and that the world, which puzzled her a little, had gone on without her. Her voice was soft and hesitating, and full of unexpected half-tones.
“Oh, have you come? Nancy! You are so welcome, my dear! I called you ‘Miss Trant’ in my note, because I thought it was the right thing when I hadn’t ever seen you. But I needn’t go on being so stiff, need I? Billy said he thought I needn’t.”
The Governor had disappeared towards the car again.
“Your boxes have gone upstairs, dear, and you might like to rest before it’s time to get ready for dinner. Blanche will take you to your room,” added Mrs. Waters, holding back Theo, whose yellow head and whose long legs seemed just about to precipitate themselves after me—for that child to enjoy another good look, no doubt. “No, Cariad, you can’t go either! Come, Missis’s little dog”—the long white body was frolicking about just ahead of me. “He knows he never enters the house!”
And I knew the pet dogs who are supposed to cherish these rules. Cariad flung himself gleefully in front of the diffident, fair-haired Blanche as she escorted me upstairs.
We were on the landing when the sound of a voice that I hadn’t heard before, clear as a bell and distinct as a choir-boy’s solo, rang up to us from below.
“No won-der, Mother! Mother, I say, no won-der! Is-n’t she pretty? Billy never told us! He never——.”
Here an abrupt full-stop.
“Oh, I do hope you won’t mind Theo; she is rather awful sometimes,” murmured Blanche Waters, as apologetically scarlet as if she had done something to offend me. “She will say things—and so loud! It’s only because she’s so pleased—and she’s only thirteen really—it’s awful being so tall. People always expect you to be so much more sensible, somehow! This is your room.” She opened a white door. “Outside, Cariad! (He knows he never comes upstairs.) Do let me unpack for you, Nancy.”