“Do not interrupt me when I am talking to your father,” she said. “The glass doors, Philip.”
Raymond with a smile, half-indulgent of senile whims, half-protesting, turned to the girl.
“Glass doors, indeed,” he said. “The next glass doors are for us, eh, Violet?”
Surely some spell had seized them all. Violet found herself waiting as tensely as her grandmother for Philip’s reply. She was hardly conscious of Raymond’s hand stealing into hers; all hung on her uncle’s answer. And he, as if he, too, were under the spell, turned furiously on Raymond.
“The glass doors are opened when I please,” he said. “Your turn will come to give orders here, Raymond, but while I am at Stanier I am master. Once for all understand that.”
He turned to his mother again.
“Yes, dear mother,” he said, “you and I will go and open them.”
Inside the house no less than among the watchers on the terrace the intelligence that Colin was at hand had curiously spread. Footmen were in the hall already, and the major-domo was standing at the entrance door, which he had thrown open, and through which poured a tide of hot air from the baking gravel of the courtyard. Exactly opposite were the double glass doors, Venetian in workmanship, and heavily decorated with wreaths and garlands of coloured glass. The bolts and handles and hinges were of silver, and old Lady Yardley, crippled and limping no longer, moved quickly across to them, and unloosing them, threw them open. Inside was the staircase of cedar wood, carved by Gibbons, which led up to the main corridor, opposite the door that gave entrance to the suite of rooms occupied by the eldest son and his wife.
What strange fancy possessed her brain none knew, and why Philip allowed and even helped her in the accomplishment of her desire was as obscure to him as to the others, but with her he pushed the doors back and the sweet odour of the cedar wood, confined there for the last sixty years, flowed out like the scent of some ancient vintage. Then, even as the crunching of the motor on the gravel outside was heard, stopping abruptly as the car drew up at the door, she swept across to the entrance.
Already Colin stood in the doorway. For coolness he had travelled bareheaded and the gold of his hair, tossed this way and that, made a shining aureole round his head. His face, tanned by the southern suns, was dark as bronze below it, and from that ruddy-brown his eyes, turquoise blue, gleamed like stars. He was more like some lordly incarnation of life and sunlight and spring-splendour than a handsome boy, complete and individual; a presence of wonder and enchantment stood there.... Then, swift as a sword-stroke, the spell which had held them all was broken; it was but Colin, dusty and hot from his journey, and jubilant with his return.