"Mr. Beaumont," remarked Edith in a tone of inspiration.
"So he told me, because we sat and talked after that. I rather liked him, and he gave me a cigarette."
"A cigarette?" asked Edith. "You don't mean——"
Elizabeth laughed.
"Oh, dear, have I done anything improper?" she asked. "But, anyhow, Ellis wasn't there. He is rather mad, I suppose, isn't he—Mr. Beaumont, I mean? Then while we were sitting there an awful woman came along the path, like a witch in spectacles and the most enormous boots I ever saw."
"Yes?" said Edith, rather apprehensively.
"You would never guess; it was his sister. After I had said she was like a witch. Then she became like a policeman and took him in charge, and I was left smoking my cigarette all alone. The heather smelt so good, better than the cigarette. But everything smells good in England, and reminds you of being clean and happy and cool. But oh, Edith, the Indian smell, the old tired wicked smell! There's always a little bit of it smouldering in my heart like a joss-stick. It's made of incense and hot sand and brown naked people and the filth of the streets and the water-cart; it's savage and eternal, and it reeks of—it doesn't matter.... Oh look! Ellis is brushing the grass's hair! Docs he comb it as well?"
Edith had but little chance of saying anything at all while these remarkable statements were being poured out by her cousin, but as a matter of fact she was well content to listen. Two years ago, when she had seen Elizabeth last, the latter was a tall, thin, sallow girl, with bursts of high spirits and long intervals of languid silences, and now, with the strength of two years added and the flow of her adolescent womanhood tingling in her veins, she was a very different creature. Her sallow face was tinged with warm blood, giving her the warm brown complexion that goes with black hair and soft dark eyes; it was as impossible not to feel the kindly effect of her superb vitality as to be insensible to the glow of a frosty-burning fire. She was taut and poised, and full of vigour as a curled spring of steel or the strained wings of a hovering hawk, with the immobile balance that implies so intense an energy. Edith, with a rather unaccustomed flight of imagination, compared herself to a sparrow hopping cheerfully about a lawn, with a nest in the ivy, and an appetite for bread-crumbs.... But apparently the sparrow had to chirrup.
"And now I want to hear all sorts of things, Edith," she said. "Tell me about Mr. Beaumont, and the witch, and who lives next door on that side and on that. On that side"—and she pointed with her long brown hand—"I saw a roundabout little woman like a cook, sitting on a bench and reading the paper. Was it the cook? Was she looking in the advertisements for another place, I wondered."
"No; Mrs. Dobbs," said Edith. "She's a friend of mother's and mine."