“You find it lovely, then.”
She shivered a little, half closing her eyes as though to shut out some unpleasant memory.
“The house,” she explained, “is on a sort of tongue of land, with a tidal river on either side and the sea not fifty yards away from our drawing-room window. When there are high tides, we are simply cut off from the mainland altogether unless we go across on a farm cart.”
“You mustn’t draw too gloomy a picture of your home,” Lady Anselman said. “I have seen it when it was simply heavenly.”
“And I have seen it,” the girl retorted, with a note of grimness in her tone, “when it was a great deal more like the other place—stillness that seems almost to stifle you, grey mists that choke your breath and blot out everything; nothing but the gurgling of a little water, and the sighing—the most melancholy sighing you ever heard—of the wind in our ragged elms. I am talking about the autumn and winter now, you must remember.”
“It doesn’t sound attractive,” Granet admitted. “By-the-bye, which side of Norfolk are you? You are nowhere near Brancaster, I suppose?”
“We are within four miles of it,” the girl replied quickly. “You don’t ever come there, do you?”
Granet looked at her with uplifted eyebrows.
“This is really rather a coincidence!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been to Brancaster in my life but I’ve promised one or two fellows to go down to the Dormy House there, to-morrow or the next day, and have a week’s golf. Geoff Anselman is going, for one.”
The girl was for a moment almost good-looking. Her eyes glowed, her tone was eloquently appealing.