Underneath her gossip and laughter with the boys, and her altercation with Aunt Adela as to when the trap should be ready and her necessary appreciation of Gran’papa’s concomitant and rounded jest—underneath the hurry of the dressing hour and her own delicious difficulties with hair and frock, she was nevertheless aware of that refrain. In spite of herself she listened, marked time to it, fled from it into the inmost recesses of her mind, and still listened to it as a sick woman listens to a fly roaming the room, or to a barrel-organ, devil-driven, in the street below.
It left her at last. It left her when she reached the Priory and found Justin glad to see her. It left her then and she forgot it at once and as utterly as if it had never been. But as she sat at table enjoying herself, enjoying the lights and the excitement, and the feel of her new dress, and the looks of the folk she loved, she felt suddenly very tired. She supposed that she wanted her dinner. She hadn’t done anything special that day.... It was ridiculous to be so tired ... so dead tired....
CHAPTER XXVI
It was a very pleasant little dinner-party. Everybody had been cheerful and talkative, and pleased with everybody else. The new curate was as neutral as a curate should be and as Annabel Moulde would let him. Old Mr. Valentine, quoting Shakespeare and criticizing the cooking, was mellow with his hostess, and merciful to his grandchildren, and even allowed Aunt Adela, who always expanded in the presence of ‘the gentlemen,’ to gush and flutter unreproved at his deafer ear.
Wilfred and James, reliable as electric switches, had been instantly illuminated by the advent of the two pretty cousins and by the end of the meal, were already in the stammering stage of a great devotion, though still uncertain at which shrine to pay their vows. James, singing Maid of Athens with equal feeling and flatness, for the ensnarement of Lucy, could yet cock the eye of a connoisseur upon the proprietress of Wilfred: and Wilfred, after seconding his brother with one finger in the treble and a magnificent if uncertain bass accompaniment, was yet not averse, as he cushioned himself on the congratulations of Rhoda, from twirling his mustachelets, so much more promising than those of James, in full view of his twin’s enchantress. Indeed, Laura’s experience, had she been attending to them, would have prophesied a-set-to partners before the evening was over, but a probable as-you-were by the end of the following day. She would have foreseen a matinée—two or three matinées—and probably a day on the river. She could have told you, for all her unworldly air, that Rhoda (Laura did not approve of Rhoda) would wear entirely unsuitable clothes, yet look so garishly attractive in them that James would be once more unsettled in his mind: and that Wilfred, the good comrade, and always the more puritan in his tastes, would be relievedly ready to console Lucy: and that Lucy of the dove-grey frocks, and neat shoes and gloves, would be demurely ready to be consoled: and that in the small hours of Sunday she, Laura, would be roused from sound sleep to entertain pyjamas and receive confidences, bestowed, as a dog bestows the stone he wishes you to throw for him, with circlings and shyings, and coy withdrawals, with a depositing of it at your feet, and a thinking better of it, and a hasty retreat, and an elaborate pretence of wishing to be unmolested, and of not knowing anything of any stone at all.
Laura could have anticipated her brothers’ every gambit to you, if she had not been occupied in discovering how different from the Justin of relaxed waistcoat and pre-historic tweeds was the Justin of evening dress and hospitable exertions, if she had not been so delightfully employed in saying how-do-you-do to his creaseless shirt-front and discreet studs and the unusually high collar that suited him better than she could have believed, and in renewing acquaintance with his deep voice and his slow sentences and his kind eyes.
Dinner-parties were rare enough for Mrs. Cloud to be similarly engaged. Somewhere near his tie (it was a badly managed affair—the hands of both women were itching to be at it) their glances met and exchanged conviction that you might scour many more dinner-tables than England held before you found another Justin.
“He has his little faults, of course,” conceded Laura’s eyes.
“And I am the first to admit them,” returned Mrs. Cloud’s.