She turned round from the box and faced him. The red winter sunset glowed softly upon her. Her grey eyes looked straight into it.
"No!" she said again. "I had my little girl to take care of for the first six months. You see, she was born blind, soon after her father's death, and she needed all the care I could give her."
Piers made a sharp movement—a gesture that was almost passionate; but he said nothing.
Avery withdrew her eyes from the sunset, and looked at him. "She died," she said, "and that left me with nothing to do. I have no near relations. So I just had to set to work to find something to occupy me. I went into a children's hospital for training, and spent some years there. Then when that came to an end, I took a holiday; but I found I wanted children. So I cast about me, and finally answered Mr. Lorimer's advertisement and came here." She began to smile. "At least I have plenty of children now."
"Oh, I say!" broke in Piers. "What a perfectly horrible life you've had!
You don't mean to say you're happy, what?"
Avery laughed. "I'm much too busy to think about it. And now I really must run back. I've promised to take charge of the babies this afternoon. Good-bye!" She held out her hand to him with frank friendliness, as if she divined the sympathy he did not utter.
He gripped it hard for a moment. "Thanks awfully for being so decent as to tell me!" he said, looking back at her with eyes as frank as her own. "I'm going on down to the home farm. Good-bye!"
He raised his cap, and abruptly strode away. And in the moment of his going Avery found she liked him better than she had liked him throughout the interview, for she knew quite well that he went only in deference to her wish.
She turned to retrace her steps, feeling puzzled. There was something curiously attractive about the young man's personality, something that appealed to her, yet that she felt disposed to resist. That air of the ancient Roman was wonderfully compelling, too compelling for her taste, but then his boyishness counteracted it to a very great degree. There was a hint of sweetness running through his arrogance against which she was not proof. Audacious he might be, but it was a winning species of audacity that probably no woman could condemn. She thought to herself as she returned to her charges that she had never seen a face so faultlessly patrician and yet so vividly alive. And following that thought came another that dwelt longer in her mind. Deprived of its animation, it would not have been a happy face.
Avery wondered why.