“Jam, Ellen! Plum jam, with the scones—plenty of it—and in here, please.”
And when Ellen had moved a wicker table to a place before the fire, covered it with the whitest of cloths and set upon it a tray on which a teapot steamed merrily and a salad nestled temptingly among cresses and a covered muffin dish made promises and the plum jam glowed colorfully, the girl in the big wicker chair across the table from Archibald was all cheerfulness.
“Peggy gives you dinners perhaps?” she queried. “Women folk fall into picnicing ways when there are no men about the house to be considered, and I never let meals interfere with sunsets, so I have my tea whenever I come in. Of course we don’t really need an open fire to-night, but I love it so and, thank Heaven, even the summer nights are usually cool enough for it, so I sit here in the evenings and sip and munch and tell over the day’s doings—and, once in a while, I send a pitying thought toward all the folk who are eating dinners in rose-and-gilt city restaurants.”
“Poor wretches,” murmured Archibald, sinking back luxuriously among his cushions and looking around him at the low ceilinged room with its gay chintz and wicker and old mahogany, its companioning books and pictures, its great bowls of June flowers and greenery. A friendly room.
His eyes came back to the mistress of it, and rested there contentedly.
She was busying herself with the tea and he had always liked to watch a pretty woman pouring tea. Not that this woman was pretty. He discarded the word fastidiously. She was something better than pretty, something much more satisfying. Candle light and firelight touched the waves of her thick rippling hair to something like burnished copper, but it was deeply auburn in its shadows. Sun and wind had had their way with her clear skin, had tanned it, had even freckled it—but tenderly, mellowing white to cream, rose flush to ripened peach, splashing a nose far from classic with the faintest of brown touches, melting almost invisibly into the sun warmed tan.
Her mouth was over-large by artist’s canons, but sweetness lurked in its curves and the generous mobile lips were warmly red. And her eyes—Archibald puzzled vainly over their color. Hazel, he had thought them at first sight, but as they looked at him across the tea cups they looked deeply gray—or were they violet in their shadows?
“My friends—the people who were my friends in my rose-and-gilt restaurant days—think I am quite mad because I live up here the year round,” she was saying. “There’s no making them understand that I like it. I tried at first but they insisted upon being sorry for me and that’s a great strain on friendship, you know. So now we exchange pity.”
“You’ve lived here a long time?” asked Archibald.
“Five years. I had no idea of staying when I came. This old farm had come into my father’s hands years before and one summer Mother and I had fixed it up a bit and spent part of a summer in it. It was one of the few things that was left after my father’s death. I came away here for healing,—and I found it—after a time—here among my hills and my own people.”