'There's a sumptuous tea-fight preparing in there. They've fetched the hamper, and Mrs. Hodnet is producing all the delicacies of the season!'
'Is Lady Caergwent there?' and Bernard came forward to meet her; while Lord Ernest paused to answer Robina's congratulating eyes. 'Yes, when I found that it was her own self, there was no helping it. I forgot all about earning her better opinion. I could only ask her forgiveness. I shall tell my father I owe it all to you.'
'Nonsense!'
'I do, though. If you hadn't all been what you are, I should have made an irrevocable ass of myself.'
'As—oh dear!—some one else is doing,' said Robina to herself, as she caught the words Bernard was addressing to the Countess, standing in the door-way of the great farm kitchen. 'I am only sorry for what you were exposed to in my absence.—My brothers are dreadfully cut up about it, but I know you'll overlook it. They are excellent fellows, but you see they have never had any advantages.'
An ineffably funny glance passed between Lord Ernest and Robina, who had a strong desire to take Mr. Bear by the shoulders and shake him, only unluckily her head was only on a level with those same broad shoulders.
'I never could have overlooked it, if they had left Geraldine to look after any one else,' said Lady Caergwent, with some of the hauteur she could assume, and very decidedly moving forward, but with the flowers in her hand that Bernard had brought her.
The party far exceeded the capacities of Mrs. Hodnet's parlour, where the lodgers usually sat, and were much more happily disposed of in the great kitchen, one of those still flourishing in old farm-houses, spacious though low, with a stone floor, a long oak table, and benches and a dresser glittering with metal and fine old earthenware, a great hearth with a lively fire, and a deep latticed window making quite a little chamber, where stood the small round table and two chairs, the leisure resort of Mr. and Mrs. Hodnet, the one with pipe and paper, the other with work-basket of socks. A door opening into the serviceable kitchen revealed a vista of garments hung up, a red glow behind them, a girl of the farm-servant type scuttling about, and the more active spirits of the party darting to and fro. In the room the long table was laid for tea; Cherry and Will were chatting on either side of the fire, Major and Mrs. Harewood were enjoying the delight of their offspring in an oft-renewed fiction of being shut into the hamper, lost, and discovered; and Felix was amusing Gertrude May with the mysteries of Moore's Almanac on the wall, and the account of his own fruitless endeavours to promote a taste for something less oracular.
He came up as the Countess scurried in, and said, with a frankness not quite answering to Bernard's description of his despair, 'I am very sorry for our neglect, Lady Caergwent, I am afraid it caused you to be in a very unpleasant predicament; but my sister is so far from strong, that she is apt to be our first care.'
'It would be a horrid shame if she were not,' said Lady Caergwent brightly. 'I should not have been and gone and lost myself!—You've not caught cold, Geraldine!'