Alex realized that her white frock and plain straw hat were indistinguishable from all the other white frocks and straw hats present, seen from the back.
"Hush," said young Nottingham more cautiously. "That was one of the girls of the house, a Miss Clare."
"Can't play a bit, can she? The other one wasn't bad. Didn't one of them give poor Cardew the chuck or something?"
"Oh, shut up," Nottingham rebuked the indiscreet one. "Much more likely he chucked her, if you ask me."
Alex could bear the risk of their discovering her proximity no longer, and hastened into the house.
It was the first afternoon since her arrival at Windsor that she had not looked eagerly for the afternoon post.
The letter, a square, bluish envelope of cheap glazed paper, caught her eye almost accidentally on the table in the hall.
She recognized it instantly, and snatching it up, opened and read it standing there, with the scent of a huge bowl of late roses pervading the whole hall, and the distant sound of cries and laughter faintly penetrating to her ears from the tennis-court and garden outside.
Mother Gertrude's writing showed all the disciplined regularity characteristic of a convent, with the conventional French slope and long-tailed letters, the careful making of which Alex herself had had instilled into her in Belgium.
The phraseology of the Superior's letter was conventional, too, and even her most earnest exhortations, when delivered in writing, bore the marks of restraint.