“Oh, bother your old business!” interrupted Francie; “anyway, I hear her bringing in the tea.”
“Oh, I hope you’ll ride home with me,” said Christopher; “I hate riding by myself.”
“Much I pity you!” said Francie, flashing a side-long look at him as she went over to the tea-table; “I suppose you’d be frightened!”
“Quite so. Frightened and bored. That is what I feel like when I ride by myself,” said Christopher, trying to eliminate from his manner the constraint that Lambert’s arrival had imparted to it, “and my horse is just as bored; I feel apologetic all the time and wishing I could do something to amuse him that wouldn’t be dangerous. Do come; I’m sure he’d like it.”
“Oh, how anxious you are about him!” said Francie, cutting bread and butter with a dexterous hand from the loaf that Louisa had placed on the table in frank confession of incapacity. “I don’t know what I’ll do till I’ve had my tea. Here now, here’s yours poured out for both of you; I suppose you’d like me to come and hand it to you!” with a propitiatory look at Lambert.
Thus adjured, the two men seated themselves at the table, on which Francie had prepared their tea and bread and butter with a propriety that reminded Christopher of his nursery days. It was a very agreeable feeling, he thought; and as he docilely drank his tea and laughed at Francie for the amount of sugar that she put into hers, the idealising process to which he was unconsciously subjecting her advanced a stage. He was beginning to lose sight of her vulgarity, even to wonder at himself for ever having applied that crudely inappropriate word to her. She had some reflected vulgarities of course, thought the usually hypercritical Mr. Christopher Dysart, and her literary progress along the lines he had laid down for her was slow; but, lately, since his missionary resolve to let the light of culture illuminate her darkness, he had found out subtle depths of sweetness and sympathy that were, in their responsiveness, equivalent to intellect.
When Francie went up a few minutes later to put on her habit, Christopher did not seem disposed to continue the small talk in which his proficiency had been more surprising than pleasing to Mr. Lambert.
He strolled over to the window, and looked meditatively out at Mrs. Bruff and a great-grandchild or two embowered in a tangle of nasturtiums, and putting his hands in his pockets began to whistle sotto voce. Lambert looked him up and down, from his long thin legs to his small head, on which the light brown hair grew rather long, with a wave in it that was to Lambert the height of effeminacy. He began to drum with his fingers on the table to show that he too was quite undisturbed and at his ease.
“By the bye, Dysart,” he observed presently, “have you heard anything of Hawkins since he left?”
Christopher turned round. “No, I don’t know anything about him except that he’s gone to Hythe.”