But it was patent that Laura, slightly annoying to Justin though her attitude might be, must stick to her principles and remain aloof. And for a wavering, half-hearted week or two she did remain aloof, attending strictly to her own affairs, settling down to quiet life in Brackenhurst, to dusting the drawing-room and paying calls with Aunt Adela and bearing with a Gran’papa grown no younger and no less tetchy in two years. Out of the tail of her eye, however, she could observe Justin, missing her but little, it seemed, as, his camera hung from his shoulder, he passed her in Brackenhurst by-ways with a nod and a smile. That she could have borne longer, but when she next took tea at the Priory she found that Annabel Moulde, who had also left school and put up her hair and who wore a frock and a manner that made Laura feel childish, was also taking tea at the Priory, and that Justin (who had never liked Annabel) was nevertheless confiding to her, over chocolate éclairs, items of oological interest that he ought to have been telling Laura. (Surely he ought to have been telling them to Laura?)
She said less about cruelty to parent birds, and the comparative value of a dead shell and a live songster as she stood beside Justin ten minutes later at his open cabinet and admired a fortnight’s spoils. Justin (I do not know why) had asked her to come and look at them, and Annabel (I do not know how) had been left in the drawing-room to talk to Mrs. Cloud. Annabel was calling on Mrs. Cloud, wasn’t she?
And Laura went out with Justin the next morning by invitation, and was sound on the axiom that birds could not count. On the following afternoon she was the proud discoverer of a willow-wren’s nest that Justin had overlooked, and their Saturday whole-day expedition to the Warren Woods beyond Beech Hill was such a success that it became a weekly institution.
Behold her then, one warm Friday night of June, retiring to bed at ten o’clock after a day of virtue and housewifery. Aunt Adela was away for the week-end: and after turning out the dining-room with Maud Ann; impressing her idea of chervil salad (acquired from sundry student festivals in forsaken Rue Honorine) upon Aunt Adela’s severely British cook; entertaining the Vicarage, that always mistook at-home days, with tea and small-talk; and playing double-dummy, grimly, with Gran’papa all the long light beckoning evening, she felt that she was at last and indeed a grown-up lady; but that as long as she had her Saturdays with Justin she could bear it. Behold her further, producing from the bottom of her hat-box a most private store of candles (Aunt Adela did not approve of young people reading in bed) washing out her newest blouse and ironing it then and there with the spirit iron that Mrs. Cloud had given her in Italy: and thereafter, tucked up in bed, absorbed in a chronique scandaleuse, with plates, of the thrush family (order Passeres), not to mention their cousins the warblers and the white-throats, and their collaterals the tits and the finches and the pipits and the shrikes, and so leave her, at last, in the dazed middle of a sentence, to sleep and the shifting pageant of her dreams.
CHAPTER XVIII
Laura was awakened by a soft warmth upon her cheek, a touch that might have been a kiss or a drifting feather or her kitten’s tentative paw, but was, when she lifted lazy hands to it, no more than a beam of sunshine, a finger-tip of morning, thrust in between thick hangings to rouse a votary.
She was out of bed in an instant, barefooted and clear-eyed, paying her vows in deep breaths of pure pleasure, while the hoarse jingle of the curtain rings, as she pulled them apart, attuned like a clash of cymbals to the choruses of the birds.
Early as it was, the dawn, dewy, startled, fugitive, had disappeared and the perfect day spread itself before her, arrogantly, from hill to hill, a peacock trailing splendours of blue and green and gold. Already earth-line and sky-line were melting into one, and the distant valleys and the little red-capped villages were half hidden in a quivering haze of heat. The breeze, tiny and half asleep, was burdened with the scents of a hundred fields and woods and gardens. The church clock, chiming five, sang seconds to the treble of the larks and in the roses at her elbow the bees boomed out their bass. And the sunlight, like the Spirit of God, brooded over the beautiful land.
She leaned out and caught at the great barbed ropes of briar swinging loose from the wall, and pulled them up to her to plunge with the greater ease face and neck into the massed delicacy of the roses, pink and white and cream, twenty sisters to a stalk: and drew back at last, too drenched with dew to think of bed again, to have her bath and plan over the expedition to come.