It seemed to him an interminable time before they left the lingering outskirts of the town behind them, and even when the last bow-window and gable tailed down into the original four-square cottage, the country about was still grime-clad, smut-bound. But Aura did not appear to notice it. In her eyes sat eternal hope, eternal spring, which finds the old world good.
Even when they sat finally on the sand-set bit of common, interspersed with straggly heath and unkempt gorse which was all the nature that Chorley Hill boasted, she did not seem to see the copious orange peel, the screws of sandwich paper which, to Ned's fastidiousness made the place horrible. Her eyes were on the distances where the Welsh hills showed blue.
"How I would love to see Cwmfaernog again!" she said suddenly, "you know, of course, the poor place had to be sold. Ted very nearly had to pay----"
Lord Blackborough cut short her repetition. "But he didn't," he remarked, "for I bought it."
"You bought it," she echoed incredulously; "Ted never told me that." She glanced to her husband, who, flat on the sand with his hat over his eyes, was apparently asleep in the sunshine. The attitude discovered the fact that six months of happy married life--and, no doubt, Aura's cooking--had made him perceptibly larger in the waist. He was evidently following Mr. Hirsch's example, thought Ned; though he might, like other folk, have grown leaner upon grief; for Ned, happily, had not lost the faculty of mocking at his own troubles.
"I wonder why he never told me," said Aura, vaguely vexed, making Ned--like the fool that he was, he told himself--instant in excuse.
"He didn't know, I expect; my agent bought it for me. Yes! there it is with Martha and Adam--you know they are married?"
Aura laughed. "Yes! I had a letter from Martha saying she was agreeably disappointed with her lot. That is what I am, too;" she paused. "I should love to go there again. Will you take me some day?"
"Perhaps," he replied soberly, while his pulses bounded.
"May would be the best month for me," she said dreamily. "Besides there are the wild hyacinths--they are like the floor of heaven!"