She made herself converse gently with her stepfather's wife, and won her liking before they reached Paddington station. If she had not been so highly strung and preoccupied, she would have been thrilled in all her fine senses at the idea of leaving Upminster, further than which she had never been for the twelve long years of her residence at La Sarthe Chase; but now, except that all appeared a wild rush and a bewildering noise, the journey to London made no impression upon her. It was swallowed up in the one longing to get there—to be able somehow to communicate with Cheiron, and have her anxiety laid to rest.
The newsboys were selling the evening papers when they arrived, but her eyes, so unaccustomed to all these new sights, did not warn her to scan the headlines, though as they were reaching Grosvenor Gardens where Mr. Anderton's town-house was situated, she did see the words: "Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs." The sheet had fallen forward and only this line was visible.
They did not strike her very forcibly. She was quite unacquainted with the custom of advertising sensational news in London. It might be the usual political announcements—it surely was, since she saw another sheet as they got to the door with "Crisis in the Cabinet" upon it. And it comforted her greatly. John, of course, was concerned with this, and had been summoned back suddenly, having had no possible time to let her know. He who was so true an Englishman must think of his country first. It seemed like an answer to her prayers, and enabled her to go in and greet her stepfather with calm and quiet.
James Anderton had come from the city in the best of tempers. The day had been a good one. He had received his wife's telegram announcing that Halcyone would accompany her on her return, and awaited her arrival with a certain amount of uneasy curiosity and interest. Would the girl be still so terribly like Elaine and the rest of the La Sarthe—especially Timothy, that scapegrace, handsome Timothy, her father, on whose memory and his own bargain with Timothy's widow he never cared much to dwell?
Yes, she was, d----d like—after a while he decided; with just the same set of head and careless grace, and that hateful stamp of breeding that had so lamentably escaped his own children, half La Sarthe, too. It was just Timothy of the gray eyes come back again—not Elaine so much now, not at all, in fact, except in the line of the throat.
His solid, coarse voice was a little husky, and those who knew him well would have been aware that James Anderton was greatly moved as he bid his stepdaughter welcome.
And when she had gone off to her room, accompanied by the boisterous Mabel and Ethel, he said to his wife:
"Lu, you must get the girl some decent clothes. She looks confoundedly a lady, but that rubbish isn't fair to her. Rig her out as good as the rest—no expense spared. See to it to-morrow, my dear."
And Mrs. Anderton promised. She adored shopping, and this would be a labor of love. So she went off to dress for dinner, full of visions of bright pinks and blues and laces and ribbons that would have made Halcyone shrink if she had known.
Mabel was magnificently patronizing and talked a jargon of fashionable slang which Halcyone hardly understood. Some transient gleam of her beloved mother kept suggesting itself to her when Mabel smiled. The memory was not distinct enough for her to know what it was, but it hurt her. The big, bouncing, overdeveloped girl had so little of the personality which she had treasured all these years as of her mother—treasured even more than remembered.