He knew that she fostered this idea because she wished him to marry. He told himself that, in point of fact, he was not fond of children at all, and supposed that she based her assertion on an isolated liking for the intelligent small boy of an under-gardener.
Presently he saw the two children, in very modified mourning, under a great ilex-tree at the bottom of the garden. They were sitting on a bench side by side, very quietly, but they both rose at the sound of his crutch on the gravel.
“How do you do?” said Ludovic gravely, and shook hands with them both.
His first thought was that it was not fair to speak of Rosamund Grantham, at all events, as a child, to bring her out to tea, as though she were in need of childish diversion to make her forget a childish sorrow, to send her to play in the garden. He thought that perhaps she also had felt it so. Resentment smouldered in her dark-ringed eyes, and in the sulkily-cut lines of her very beautiful mouth.
There was much to recall the Slavonic type in her, in the high moulding of the cheek-bones, the straight, rather blunt nose, opaque ivory complexion, and straight black brows. Her eyes, sombre and heavy-lidded, were of a colour seldom seen in England—the true tint of clear deep grey. Her build, however, showed no trace of a squat, square-standing, Hungarian ancestry. She was very tall for her thirteen years, but gave the impression of having already almost attained to her full growth. Straight and square-shouldered, she was far too thin for beauty, from the defiant curve of neck and upheld chin to the long slim fingers, betraying sensitiveness in every outstanding blue vein and narrowed finger-tip.
Ludovic Argent, then and thereafter, thought that he had never seen a creature more at odds with her world and her passionate unbalanced self, than was Rosamund Grantham.
Frances, her face at eleven years old already bearing the impress of the dreamer in the steadfast gaze of eyes as grey as those of her sister, gave a sense of reliance and purposefulness that seemed to Ludovic amazing. Her small face had a classical delicacy of outline, her mouth was pathetically childish. Both had the same very soft brown hair growing in a curious little point on the low square forehead, and seeming too light in colour and texture for the dark brows and lashes beneath.
Both greeted Ludovic with serious self-possession, but Frances smiled at him a little, timidly, revealing teeth that sloped inwards.
“My mother sent me to tell you that tea is ready. She is in the library with Mrs. Tregaskis,” he said.
“Shall we come, then?” murmured Rosamund conventionally. Her manner was that of a princess, and he surmised that whatever the Hungarian past of Mrs. Grantham might have concealed, a very secure assurance in her own ineradicable birthright and breeding had descended to her daughter.