"Oh, I say, shall I?" asked Guy flushing with pleasure.
"Such a lamb, Margaret," said Pauline, kissing her sister impulsively and being straightly reproved for doing so.
The good-nights were all said, and Guy walked up the drive with Brydone and Willsher.
"Queer family, aren't they?" commented the doctor's son.
"Extraordinarily charming," said Guy.
"I've known them all my life," said Willsher a little querulously. "And yet I never seem to know them any better."
Guy was so much elated by this admission that he repeated more warmly his invitation to come and see him and his books, and parted from the two friends very pleasantly.
Two or three days later Guy thought he might fairly make his dinner call, and with much forethought did not take Bob with him, so that soon there might be an excuse to come again to effect that introduction. Mrs. Grey and Monica were out; and Guy was invited to have tea in the nursery with Margaret and Pauline. He was conscious that an honour had been paid to him, partly by intuition, partly because neither of the girls said a conventional word about not going into the drawing-room. He felt, as he sat in that room fragrant with the memories of what must have been an idyllic childhood, the thrill that, as a child, he used to feel when he read: 'The Queen was in her parlour eating bread and honey.' This was such another parlour infinitely secluded from the world; and he thought he had never experienced a more breathless minute of anticipation than when he followed the girls along the corridor to their nursery. The matting worn silky with age seemed so eternally unprofaned, and on the wall outside the door the cuckoo calling five o'clock was like a confident bird in some paradise where neither time nor humanity was of much importance. Janet, the elderly parlourmaid, came stumping in behind them with the nursery tea-things; and, as Guy sat by the small hob-grate and saw the moist autumnal sun etherealize with wan gold the tattered volumes of childhood, the very plumcake on the tea-table was endowed with the romantic perfection of a cake in a picture-book. When the sun dipped behind the elms, Guy half expected that Margaret and Pauline would vanish too, so exactly seemed they the figures that, were this room a mirage, he would expect to find within as guardians of the rare seclusion. Guy never could say what was talked about, that afternoon; for when he found himself outside once again in the air of earth, he was bemused with the whole experience, as if suddenly released from enchantment. Out of a multitude of impressions, which had seemed at the time most delicately strange and potent, only a few incidents quite common-place haunted his memory tangibly enough to be seized and cherished. Tea-cups floating on laughter against that wall-paper of berries, birds and daisies; a pair of sugar-tongs clicking to the pressure of long white fingers (so much could he recapture of Margaret); crumpets in a rosy mist (so much was Pauline); a copper kettle singing; the lisp of the wind; a disarray of tambour-frames and music, these were all that kept him company on his way back to Plashers Mead through the colourless twilight.
Chance favoured Guy next day by throwing him into the arms of the Rector, who asked if he were fond enough of flowers to look round the garden at a dull season of the year. Guy was so much elated that, if love of flowers meant more frequent opportunities of going to the Rectory, he would have given up poetry to become a professional gardener. Of course there was nothing to see, according to the Rector—a few Nerines of his own crossing in the greenhouse; a Buddleia Auriculata honeycomb-scented in the angle of two walls; the double Michaelmas daisy, an ugly brute already condemned to extermination; a white Red Hot Poker, evidently a favourite of the Rector's by the way he gazed upon it and said so casually Kniphofia Multiflora, as if it were not indeed a treasure blooming in Oxfordshire's dreary Autumn.
"Tulips to go in next week," said the Rector, rolling the prospect upon his tongue with meditative enjoyment. "A friend of mine has just sent me some nice fellows from Bokhara and Turkestan. I ought to get them in this week, but Birdwood must finish with these roses. And I've got a lot of Clusiana too that ought to be in. I am going to try her in competition with shrubbery roots and see if they'll make her behave herself."