She followed wondering. She knew not why she had promoted this discussion. She felt that she had been very unbalanced all the day.
They went back to the house almost silently and through the green drawing-room window again and up the broad stairs with Sir William Hamilton's huge decorative painting of an Ardayre group of his time, filling one vast wall at the turn.
And so they reached the cedar parlour, and found coffee waiting and cigarettes.
There was a growing tension between them and each guessed that the other was not calm. Amaryllis began showing him the view from the windows across the park, and then the old fireplace and panelling of the room.
"We sit here generally when we are alone," she said. "I like it the best of all the rooms in the house."
"It is a fitting frame for you."
They lit cigarettes.
Denzil had many things he longed to say to her of the place, and the thoughts it called up in him—but he checked himself. The thing was to get through with it all quickly and to be gone. They went into the picture gallery then, and began from the end, and when they came to the Elizabethan Denzil they paused for a little while. The painted likeness was extraordinary to the living splendid namesake who gazed up at the old panel with such interested eyes.
And Amaryllis was thinking:
"If only John had that something in him which these two have in their eyes, how happy we could be."