CHAPTER VIII
IN HORSESHOE COVE
Lady Ingleby sat in the honeysuckle arbour, pouring her tea from a little brown earthenware teapot, and spreading substantial slices of home-made bread with the creamiest of farm butter, when the aged postman hobbled up to the garden gate of the Moorhead Inn, with a letter for Mrs. O’Mara.
For a moment she could scarcely bring herself to open an envelope bearing another name than her own. Then, smiling at her momentary hesitation, she tore it open with the keen delight of one, who, accustomed to a dozen letters a day, has passed a week without receiving any.
She read Mrs. Dalmain’s letter through rapidly; and once she laughed aloud; and once a sudden colour flamed into her cheeks.
Then she laid it down, and helped herself to honey—real heather-honey, golden in the comb.
She took up her letter again, and read it carefully, weighing each word.
Then:—“Good old Jane!” she said; “that is rather neatly put: the ‘safely abstract’ becoming the ‘perilously personal.’ She has acquired the knack of terse and forceful phraseology from her long friendship with the doctor. I can do it myself, when I try; only, my Sir Derycky sentences are apt merely to sound well, and mean nothing at all. And—after all—does this of Jane’s mean anything worthy of consideration? Could six foot five of abstraction—eating its breakfast in complete unconsciousness of one’s presence, returning one’s timid ‘good-morning’ with perfunctory politeness, and relegating one, while still debating the possibility of venturing a remark on the weather, to obvious oblivion—ever become perilously personal?”