"Of course I am; and it is more than delightful to meet again in this unexpected fashion," I responded; "I had no idea you were here, either."
"Well, we aren't really," she replied, sitting down on the chair next to the one from which I had just risen to greet her, and which I at once resumed, for fear somebody should come between us. "We've taken a cottage here to which we rush for weary weekends, and return to town like giants refreshed: and we only came down to-day. And now tell me all about your wife. I hear she is younger than anybody ever was before, and much more beautiful, and I am simply expiring with curiosity to see her."
"I shall be only too pleased to introduce her to you, Lady Chayford."
Isabel gave a little scream. "Oh, for mercy's sake, don't call me by that absurd name: it makes me feel like a relic of an effete civilisation. Of the multitudes that once called me Isabel there are only a few survivors left, and I beseech them to continue the habit, or else my Christian name will be forgotten as completely as the Christian name of the Sphinx. And now let me see if I can guess which is your wife," she went on, casting her blue eyes over the various groups dotted about the garden. "I think it must be that fairy-like sylph in green: there is nobody else here who in the least answers to the description I have heard."
"You've hit the right nail on the head as usual," I replied: "that is Fay."
"Oh, Reggie, how lovely she is! And how clever it was of you to discover anybody so exquisite! Very few men do."
"But they all think that they do: which comes to the same thing as far as they are concerned."
"Not they, and you know they don't. But they think that we think that they do, and that again comes to the same thing as far as they are concerned. And now you shall trundle me round the garden for fear anybody else should come and talk to us before you've told me how Annabel is, and how Restham is looking, and how you like being married, and everything you've done since I saw you last, and all the other things that we haven't time to write letters to each other about, and shouldn't know how to spell if we tried."
So Isabel and I started on a pilgrimage through the Garden of Dreams, and soon succeeded in bringing ourselves abreast of each other's times. She was always such an easy woman to talk to, in spite of the fact that she talked almost incessantly herself: but one felt that she could always listen at the same time.
"And so you have taken a country house here," I said, after we had treated each other to a résumé of all that had happened to us since we last met.