‘Yes, my love—I mean, my friend. Even though they won’t admit it,’ said Christopher.
He was to leave her, they decided, at the Chickover gates, and at lunch she would explain him to Virginia, and then he would call for her at two o’clock and take her away. Introduced, however, to Virginia first.
‘Must I be?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ said Catherine.
With what different feelings did Christopher pack her up in the rug this time. There was no fear now, no anxiety. She laughed, and was the Catherine of the afternoon at Hampton Court,—only come so much nearer, come so close up to him, come indeed, and of her own accord, almost right into his heart.
‘My blessed little angel,’ he thought, propping her up in the seat when she was wound round and couldn’t move her arms; and her eyes were so bright, and her face so different from the face that he had seen in church two hours before, that he said, ‘You looked ten years older this morning than you did in London, and now you look twenty years younger than you did then.’
‘What age does that make me?’ she asked, laughing up at him.
‘So you see,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘how wholesome, how necessary it is to be with one’s friend.’
XVIII
Meanwhile the morning at the Manor was passing in its usual quiet yet busy dignity. Virginia attended to her household duties, while her mother and Stephen were at church, and herself cut the sandwiches that Stephen was to take up with him to London, because the ones the week before had been, he told her, highly unsatisfactory.