"Very well." Against the dark junipers, in her white uniform, she looked like a statue except for her parted lips and accusing eyes.
"Letty seems bright to-day, but you must not let her tire herself."
"I am very careful. We play as gently as possible."
"Will you take her to town? I'll send the car back for you."
For an instant she hesitated. "Mrs. Blackburn has not told me what she wishes."
He nodded. "Letty uses my car in the afternoon. It will be here at three o'clock."
In the sunlight, with his hat off, he looked tanned and ruddy, and she saw that there was the power in his face which belongs to expression—to thought and purpose—rather than to feature. His dark hair, combed straight back from his forehead, made his head appear distinctive and massive, like the relief of a warrior on some ancient coin, and his eyes, beneath slightly beetling brows, were the colour of the sea in a storm. Though his height was not over six feet, he seemed to her, while he stood there beside the marble fountain, the largest and strongest man she had ever seen. "I know he isn't big, and yet he appears so," she thought: "I suppose it is because he is so muscular." And immediately she added to herself, "I can understand everything about him except his mouth—but his mouth doesn't belong in his face. It is the mouth of a poet. I wonder he doesn't wear a moustache just to hide the way it changes."
"I shall be ready at three o'clock," she said. "Mrs. Colfax asked me to bring Letty to play with her children."
"She will enjoy that," he answered, "if they are not rough." Then, as he moved away, he observed indifferently, "It is wonderful weather."
As he went back to the house Letty clung to him, and lifting her in his arms, he carried her to the terrace and round the corner where the car waited. For the time at least the play was spoiled, and Caroline, still wearing her professional manner, stood watching for Letty to come back to her. "I could never like him if I saw him every day for years," she was thinking, when one of the French windows of the dining-room opened, and Mary Blackburn came down the steps into the garden.