‘And bring him back in your car,’ said the Duke.
‘I believe Mrs. Luke would rather not see her father,’ shouted Charles.
‘That’s right,’ said Sally, nodding her head emphatically. It did sound awful though—not wanting to see one’s father. ‘Ain’t I gettin’ wicked quick,’ she thought; and hung her head.
He didn’t seem to think so, however, the old gentleman didn’t, for he leant across to her looking as pleasant as pleasant, and patted her shoulder with his poor shaky old hand, and said she was quite right. Right? Poor old gentleman, thought Sally—past even knowing good from bad.
The Duke bent across and patted her shoulder, a broad smile on his face. Such spirit—running away from her mother-in-law, and kicking at seeing her father—delighted him. She was a high-stepper, this lovely, noble little lady, and all his life he had admired only those women whose steps were high.
‘You shan’t see him, my dear,’ he said. ‘Quite right, quite right not to wish to.’ And just as she was heaving a sigh of thankfulness he added, ‘But I will. I really must have a talk with him.’
Strange, thought Charles, this determination to talk with Sally’s father. How much better, how much more really useful, to talk with her husband, or her mother-in-law.
§
After dinner, which Sally ate reluctantly, for she well knew by now that her ways with knives and forks were somehow different from the ways of people like Lukes and dukes, and she felt, besides, that the old gentleman’s eye was on her—which it was, but her face, for she was of course now without her hat, engrossed his whole attention, and he saw nothing that her hands were doing—after dinner, after, that is, the small cups of clear soup and the grilled cutlets with floury potatoes which were the evening meal at Crippenham during the severity of the retreat, Charles went into the garden to smoke.
It was a small garden, with nothing in it but a plot of rough grass, some shrubs, a tree or two, and in one corner the shut up four-roomed cottage his father had had built for him and Laura and Terry twenty-five years ago, when first he bought Crippenham, to play at housekeeping in. For years it had been unused; a melancholy object, Charles thought whenever he went into the garden and saw it there, smothered in creepers and deserted, a relic of vanished youth, a reminder that one was getting old.