Robin smiled at her with the beautiful mouth Miss Jackson admired so much.
“And he’d actually taken a fancy to you, had he?” he asked. “I expect they’re all in love with you. Lord! I should flirt with you if you weren’t my mother.”
“You darling. But I’m a little old for you, aren’t I? You’d better stick to Miss Diphtheria.”
“She’s so damned respectable. She wouldn’t let me kiss her. Now, you’re not respectable: you don’t mind.”
Helen thought she had disciplined herself into acquiescing in Robin’s going out to France, had got used to it. But at the sight and the touch of him on this his last morning in England, her fortitude wavered like a blown flame. For the moment she could not face it at all.
“Ah, Robin, Robin!” she said.
He guessed what was in her mind, for the two read each other like open books.
“There never was such a mother,” he said. “Now let’s go out.”
It was the mildest of mid-winter days: all the autumn had been warm, too, and chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies still lingered, though already the squills and aconites, first messengers of the spring, had opened their blue bells and their yellow stars. Overhead the pale azure of the winter sky was flecked with little wrinkled clouds, as if some quiet sea had retreated, leaving the marks of breaking ripples on the ribbed sand. There was a chirruping of sparrows in the house-eaves, and a chatter as of razor-stropping from varnished starlings in a hawthorn bush, where they were lunching on the red berries, which they threw about in the rudest manner. Below the terrace the beech-woods, with trunks powdered by the green lichen growth of the autumn, and branches round which hovered a faint purple haze, clothed the steep hill-side down to the river.
At the bottom of the avenue the water, running high with rains, had flooded part of the valley, and the lowest of the trees stood mirrored in it. A pheasant with burnished copper back got up from the rough grass, and rose above the beeches with downward beating wings, and a rabbit scuttled silently into the fringe of undergrowth. Across the river the red roofs of the villages gleamed among the bare elms, and no more peaceful winter day could have been imagined. Only above the house there drooped the Red Cross flag, and in the loggia were sitting half a dozen blue-clad men with slings or crutches, and a nurse moved about among them. And yet all England was becoming one camp, one arsenal to brew the beer of war.