"If I believed in omens—" he said, and rang, to make known his return to the people of the house.
While his sitting-room was being put in order he went down to Covent Garden and came back with his arms full of roses and white lilies, which he set up in mugs and pots of Grès de Flandre and old brass and green Bruges ware.
"I wish you'd only 'a' told me, sir," said his landlady, kindly but aggrieved. "I wouldn't have had you come home and find the place all of a mess like this, not for a pound, I wouldn't. But you never wrote nor nothing, and the dust it do incriminate so. But if you're going out for the day I'll make it all as clean as a whistle by this evening. It's a twelve-hour job, so it is. If I'd only known you was to be expected."
"But you didn't know," said Edward, "and it's not going to be a twelve-hour job, but a two-hour job. I'll go out for two hours, and when I come back I sha'n't know the place, shall I? You'll work like a good fairy. I know you."
"Go on with you, sir," she advised. "You will have your joke."
"I was never more serious. You see, a lady might call." He voiced in words what he had not dared to voice in his heart.
"Oh, if it's a lady," said the landlady—and through the tired, ridged, gray, London face something pretty and immortally young stirred and sparkled—"the young lady, sir, if I might make so bold?"
"You've hit it, Mrs. Jilks," he said—"the lady. If she comes before I come back—but I don't think she will—beg her to wait and say I'll be back by noon. Come on, Charles."
He went and sat in Regents Park and tried to fancy himself once more in the deep peace of the Welsh Hills till Charles had a difference of opinion with a Cocker spaniel and dreams were set to flight.