"You will tell Mrs. Carteret, if you please, papa, I could not find her."
"I will be sure to tell her," said Mr. Carteret; "and, Margery, I want you to observe Lady Davyntry's Angora cat very carefully, and bring me word whether she has one ring or two round the top of her tail. Don't forget this, my dear, for it is really an important point."
"I'll be sure to remember it, papa," said Margaret; and then she and Mr. Fitzwilliam Meriton Baldwin went out through the French window of Mr. Carteret's study, and took their way across the grassy terrace, through the lawn, to the little iron gate which opened into the meadow-lands, through which the "short cut" between Chayleigh and Davyntry lay.
In the first field beyond this gate a noble clump of beeches stood.
"That is a favourite point of view of Dugdale's," said Mr. Baldwin. "I have two sketches he made of those forest lords. Splendid trees they are. I love them."
"And I hate them," said Margaret.
He glanced at her in surprise. Her tone was bitter, and her face wore an angry scornful look. But it was scorn of herself that Margaret was feeling. There, under the shade of those trees, she had come suddenly upon her brother and Godfrey Hungerford; there the first incense of her worship of the false god had been offered up. She felt his glance, and instantly began to talk of Lady Davyntry's cold.
"The idea," she thought indignantly, "of saying such a thing as that--of my betraying feelings to a stranger which it is impossible to explain."
The first visit made by Margaret to Davyntry was the beginning of a series which contributed not a little to bringing about the changed aspect of things at Chayleigh, at the end of the first month of Margaret's residence there. She was beginning to feel something like a revival of her youth. The cheerful society, the sense of being loved and valued; the action of time, so mighty, so resistless, when one is young; the future dim, indeed, but still in a great measure within her own control: these were all telling on the young widow.
At first she had suffered keenly from the remembrance of the past episodes in her life, which seemed to set a barrier between her and the well-regulated, spotlessly respectable social circle to which she was restored; a social atmosphere in which shifts, contrivances, shady expedients for the procuring of shabby ends, were as unknown, as inconceivable, as the more violent roisterous vice with which she had also, and only too frequently, been brought into contact. At first, this sense of an existence, separate and apart from her present associates, oppressed Margaret strangely, and caused her to shrink away from the manifestations of Lady Davyntry's friendship with sudden coldness, quite inexplicable to the impulsive Eleanor, whose life was all so emphatically aboveboard.