"Happy?" she echoed. "Oh, Ned! I have never been so happy in all my life--everything seems so new, everything seems to go on and on for ever, as if there was no end to interest and pleasure."
"I am glad," he said lamely, then added, "I shouldn't have thought----"
She followed his eyes, which had wandered to an electric blue paper covered with gigantic poppies of a deeper hue, with a frieze in which positively Brobdingnagian flowers, presumably of the same species, curled themselves in contortions terribly suggestive of a bad pain in their insides.
"Yea! isn't it awful?" she admitted with a laugh; "but I have taken all the furniture you see out of this room and stuffed it away in another empty one for the present"--an odd shy smile showed on her face, and seating herself on a stool once more she took up her work again and recommenced tucking a piece of muslin with new-born skill; for in the old days she had never touched a needle. "And it isn't quite so bad here at the back where one can't see people. But I wish my poor primroses would grow. I got them in a wood not so very far away, but the cats won't give them a chance--they scratch them up at night, poor things!" Her eyes were sorrowfully on the parallelogram of grass, gravel, and smut-blackened stems below the flight of grimy steps, which was described in the house-agent's list as a charming garden. "If it happens again I shall take them back. It is never fair to keep anything where it can't grow properly."
"Exactly so," he thought; but her face showed absolute unconsciousness.
"What do you find to do with yourself?" he asked suddenly. He felt he would go mad in a week.
"Do!"--she smiled. "Why, I never have half enough time! You see we can't afford to keep experienced servants, as yet. This house is really beyond our income, but my husband--Ted, I mean--was afraid I should not thrive in the town. It is very good of him, isn't it? to go to such expense for me."
"Very," assented Lord Blackborough, recognising Ted's phraseology and feeling bored.
"So I have to do most of the cooking," she went on quite eagerly. "It is rather fun, though Ted is quite awfully particular about his food. But he says I am getting quite a--a cordon bleue--that's right, isn't it?"
"Quite right," assented Ned gravely. He was beginning to wonder how he should get away from this atmosphere of satisfaction.