"It's heavenly," Psyche whispered. "It is nearly ten, and at the Larches Miss Eva would now be seeing which fish was the cheapest, and ordering a warm joint which would go out to the kitchen for luncheon. And it would be batter-pudding day."
"You love it, Sprite!" Gheena came running round from the stables, her clear brown skin flushed, her bare head ruffled.
"I want to live here." The English girl looked out with her pale bluey-green eyes. "I want never to leave. I want to learn the difference between squirrels and foxes, and how to sit on at jumps, and why the hounds yowl for a time and then don't say anything."
"And I"—Gheena looked out—"I want to live here sometimes, but I want to travel, and to see France and Italy and further away still, and hunt somewhere else where it's flat going, and just be here in the summer or in the autumn, but not always."
Dearest George, who came from hermetically-sealed rooms, and was consequently very chilly in the mornings, now called out that Mona would catch a bad chill if she did not at once come in.
A roaring fire mocked at economy in the long dining-room. Anne's preparations for a visitor smoked in various forms. She had what she called loosed her hand at hot bread and produced three varieties.
Psyche ate an unsprite-like breakfast, listening thoughtfully to her host's prophetic warnings of financial downfall and the general muddle of England at war.
"At present," said Mr. Freyne, coquetting between cold game-pie and hot kidneys on toast, "we are like candles alight at both ends. Everything costs more and we have less money to pay for it with."
"Why not go back to the pie, Dearest George?" advised his wife affectionately, "and not think of the kidneys, because they'll get cold."
Mr. Freyne, saying pettishly that by now Matilda might remember how delicate his appetite was, took kidneys and returned to his seat.