At the end of the summer term the twins invited Sylvia to stay with them in Hertfordshire. She refused at first, because she felt that she could not bear the idea of being jealously disturbed by a second home. The twins were inconsolable at her refusal and sent a telegram to their mother, who had already written one charming letter of invitation, and who now wrote another in which she told Sylvia of her children’s bitter disappointment and begged her to come. Miss Ashley, also, was anxious that Sylvia should go, and told her frankly that it seemed an excellent chance to think over seriously her marriage with Philip in the autumn. Philip, now that the date of her final decision was drawing near, wished her to remain with Miss Ashley in London. His opposition was enough to make Sylvia insist upon going; so, when at the end of July the school was swept by a tornado of relations and friends, Sylvia was swept away with the twins to Hertfordshire, and Philip was left to wait till the end of September to know whether she would marry him or not in October.
The Worsleys’ home at Arbour End made an altogether different impression upon Sylvia from Markham Grange. She divined in some way that the background here was not immemorial, but that the Worsleys had created it themselves. And a perfect background it was—a very comfortable red brick house with a garden full of flowers, an orchard loaded with fruit, fields promenaded by neat cows, pigsties inhabited by clean pigs, a shining dog-cart and a shining horse, all put together with the satisfying completeness of a picture-puzzle. Mr. Worsley was a handsome man, tall and fair with a boyish face and a quantity of clothes; Mrs. Worsley was slim and fair, with a rose-leaf complexion and as many clothes as her husband. The twins were even naughtier and more charming than they were at Hornton House; there was a small brother called Hercules, aged six, who was as charming as his sisters and surpassed them in wickedness. The maids were trim and tolerant; the gardener was never grumpy; Hercules’s governess disapproved of holiday tasks; the dogs wagged their tails at the least sound.
“I love these people,” Sylvia said to herself, when she was undressing on the first night of her stay. “I love them, I love them. I feel at home—at home—at home!” She leaped into bed and hugged the pillow in a triumph of good-fellowship.
At Arbour End Sylvia banished the future and gave herself to the present. One seemed to have nothing to do but to amuse oneself then, and it was so easy to amuse oneself that one never grew tired of doing so. As the twins pointed out, their father was so much nicer than any other father, because whatever was suggested he always enjoyed. If it was a question of learning golf, Mr. Worsley took the keenest interest in teaching it. When Gladys drove a ball through the drawing-room window, no one was more delighted than Mr. Worsley himself; he infected everybody with his pleasure, so that the gardener beamed at the notion of going to fetch the glazier from the village, and the glazier beamed when he mended the window, and the maids beamed while they watched him at work, and the dogs sat down in a loose semicircle, thumping the lawn with appreciative tails. The next day, when Hercules, who, standing solemnly apart from the rest, had observed all that happened, threw a large stone through the mended window, there was the same scene of pleasure slightly intensified.
Mrs. Worsley flitted through the house, making every room she entered more beautiful and more gay for her presence. She had only one regret, which was that the twins were getting so big, and this not as with other mothers because it made her feel old, but because she would no more see their black legs and their tumbled hair. Sylvia once asked her how she could bear to let them go to school, and Mrs. Worsley’s eyes filled with tears.
“I had to send them to school,” she whispered, sadly. “Because they would fall in love with the village boys and they were getting Hertfordshire accents. Perhaps you’ve noticed that I myself speak with a slight cockney accent. Do you understand, dear?”
The August days fled past and in the last week came a letter from Miss Ashley.
MURREN, August 26, 1900.
MY DEAR SYLVIA,—I shall be back from Switzerland by September 3d, and I shall be delighted to see you at Hornton House again. Philip nearly followed me here in order to talk about you, but I declined his company. I want you to think very seriously about your future, as no doubt you have been doing all this month. If you have the least hesitation about marrying Philip, let me advise you not to do it. I shall be glad to offer you a place at Hornton House, not as a schoolmistress, but as a kind of director of the girls’ leisure time. I have grown very fond of you during this year and have admired the way in which you settled down here more than I can express. We will talk this over more fully when we meet, but I want you to know that, if you feel you ought not to marry, you have a certain amount of security for the future while you are deciding what you will ultimately do. Give my love to the twins. I shall be glad to see you again.
Your affectionate
CAROLINE ASHLEY.