“Well, open yourself at the same place,” said Philip.
“Rather. Aunt Hester’s dress, wasn’t it? Isn’t she too divine? If she ever dies, which God forbid, you ought to have her stuffed and dressed just like that, and put in a glass case in the hall to shew how young it is possible to be when you’re old. But, seriously, do get a portrait done of her to hang here. There’s nothing of her in the gallery.”
“Any other orders?” asked Philip.
“I don’t think so at present. Oh, by the way, are you going to Italy this year?”
“Yes, I think I shall go out there before long for a few weeks as usual. Why?”
“I thought that perhaps you would take me. I’ve got four months’ vacation, you see, now that I’m at Cambridge, and I’ve never been to Italy yet.”
Philip paused; he was always alone in Italy. That was part of the spell. “You’d get dreadfully bored, Colin,” he said. “I shall be at the villa in Capri: there’s nothing to do except swim.”
Colin divined in his father’s mind some reluctance other than that which he expressed. He dropped his eyes for a moment, then raised them again to his father’s face, merry and untroubled.
“You don’t want me to come with you, father,” he said. “Quite all right, but why not have told me so?”
Philip looked at the boy with that expression in his face that no one else ever saw there; the tenderness for another, the heart’s need of another, which had shot into fitful flame twenty years ago, had never quite been extinguished; it had always smouldered there for Colin.