"Good day, Jacob!—The family well? Jane quite recovered from the chicken-pox, eh?"
"Quite well, Your Ladyship," and the old man's wandering eyes were fixed in adoration upon his mistress's face. "And Your Ladyship's godchild, Sarah, is growing that knowing my daughter can hardly keep her from the front garden."
"I am delighted to hear it. I shall be stopping in to see you to-morrow, tell Mrs. Peterson. This is my new secretary, Miss Bush, Jacob—you will know her again, won't you?"
"I'll try to, Your Ladyship," a little doubtfully, and he bowed deeply as the motor rolled on along a beautiful drive through the vast park, with its groups of graceful deer peering at them from under the giant trees.
Katherine was taking in the whole scene, the winter day, and the brown earth, and the blue sky, and the beauty of it all!
Yes—this sort of thing was what must be hers some day when she had fitted herself to possess it. They came to another gate—and yet another—iron ones with no lodges, and then they swept through a wide avenue with sprucely kept edges and so on up to the front door.
It was a long irregular building which Katherine saw, principally built in the middle of the seventeenth century, and added to from time to time. It was very picturesque, and when they were inside, the hall proved to be very fine. It was huge and square and panelled with some good Grinling Gibbons carving, and quantities of indifferently painted ancestors, for the most part in stiff peers' robes.—They had been a distinguished crew, not of the fox-hunting type.
"These are my people, Miss Bush, not Garribardines," Her Ladyship said, pointing to the portraits. "They were not handsome, as you see, and evidently did not encourage the best artists—the few who did are in the other rooms and the picture gallery. Come, we will go straight in to lunch; I am as hungry as a schoolboy—You will lunch with me."
Bronson had gone down much earlier and was awaiting them with two footmen, as dignified as usual.
The dining-room was in a panelled passage to the right and was a long, low room of much earlier date.