Lancelot appeared again with Naylour behind him adjusting a British warm—a Balaclava helmet under his cap, and thick gloves completing his entrenchment against the advance of a chill. Gheena's pony came rattling wickedly round at the moment, poking out its stubborn head while responding gleefully to whacks from Phil with thuds of iron against the floor of the trap.
Lancelot advanced dubiously,
"Oh, it's Miss O'Toole who is going to take you," said Gheena. "She says she won't mind the extra work for her pony, and you can talk about the recitation. Don't bury Sir John Moore."
With a glance which Anne from the kitchen reported to be as bither as weasels, Lancelot got into the inside trap.
The two girls drove off behind Topsy and turned inland, crawling along the narrow fuchsia-bordered road which led to Dillon's Court.
"You can only see the sea from the hills there," Gheena said; "but it's a dear old home."
The long, dull red house stood against a background of dark wood and mountain. The wide lawn was dotted with big trees, walnuts, oaks, huge beeches; one could hear the hoarse splutter and gurgle of the trout stream which tore on to commit suicide in the lake. In summer, to the left of the house, a mass of copper beeches passed to tender tinted pinky green, to sullen splendour of coppery crimson, glowing in every gleam of sun.
The wide hall door, standing open, was of panelled oak.
"You can see the sea from the gardens, Psyche. There's poor Darby!"
Hobbling down the four shallow steps before the door, a cripple, the last perhaps of a long line of sportsmen, the old place which he loved round him, a glorious frame, enclosing a defaced portrait. It was bitter to remember how he had leapt the sunk fence there so lightly once, swung up those copper beeches up to the topmost boughs, until he looked through a red cloud up to spatches of blue, shining down. Whole-limbed, disregarding torn clothes, jumping on the ponies' backs, looking forward to life spelt with a capital L, as his father's had been, a man's life with his son to follow him. And now—he shuffled agilely up to meet the two—brown-skinned Gheena and the white stranger, whose eyes were full of something which he had forgotten—admiration. To Psyche he was the magician who made the hounds go.