Slightly bewildered, she derided at last that her own sense of humour had need of extension, in order to cover the area of ground whereon Nicholas Aubray found subject for mirth.
She omitted to note that such ground stretched widely on either side of the line of demarcation that divides the subtlety of irony from the obviousness of mere comicality.
Nicholas stayed with the Stellenthorpes for nearly a week, and Lily took him for walks, and played the piano for his loudly expressed admiration, and was both vaguely disappointed and slightly relieved at the impersonality that generally prevailed in their conversations. She actually surmised in Nicholas a certain shyness that he had not shown in Italy, as though he sometimes doubted his own powers of pleasing and attracting her.
It was inevitable that gratified vanity should play a large part in Lily's view of the clever and distinguished man, so much her senior, who sought to win her favour with a diffidence that filled her with wonder.
Philip's manner towards his daughter had also altered, and on the day preceding the last one of Nicholas Aubray's visit, it needed only her father's pleased yet anxious glances towards herself, and in the tone in which he said: "Why not stay in this afternoon, Lily? I don't like that little cough of yours," to convey to Lily that the two men were to hold a conversation together, and that although she was not to be present at it, her father desired to make sure of her presence in the house. She acquiesced, as she had all her life acquiesced in his obliquely conveyed wishes, in part from the inculcated habit of obedience, and in part from her own moral cowardice.
"I think I shall sit over the fire in the library. Shall we have tea there? It's much warmer than the hall."
"Certainly. We'll join you there."
This time Nicholas, as well as Philip, cast a glance at her that seemed to bear unspoken meanings.
Lily's afternoon in the library was not a reposeful one.
She tried at first to feel pleasure in her own undoubted resemblance to the heroine of a novel. Situation and setting were alike traditional. No doubt Nicholas Aubray was at that moment asking formal assent of her father to the right of proposing to her.