If she had been unmoved at the meeting, or if her manner and look had been different, he would not have been so much perturbed as he was. But it was not merely that she looked infinitely surprised, startled, and alarmed at the sight of him, but that there was in her face an expression which seemed to bear only one possible interpretation: she looked guilty.
Try as he would to forget the impression her face made upon him at that first moment of astonishment at the meeting, he could not banish the disagreeable impression.
She had turned at once from him, after the first words of greeting, to speak again to Arthur Aldington, and to make inquiries after the rest of his family. But Gerard saw in this rapid turning away from himself only another proof of guilty consciousness on her part that he was there and that he was watching her.
He turned away into the gardens, leaving the terrace and going down towards the broad fish-pond, which lay in a hollow at the end of a series of velvety lawns broken up by flower beds which were a mass of tall, handsome, flowering plants.
The gardens were one of the sights of the county, and even in the state of uneasiness and anxiety from which he was suffering, Gerard was conscious of their beauty.
So, too, were other people. For wandering about among the high hedges of yew and over the soft lawns, he found a dozen groups of two and three persons, enjoying the warm summer air, and gathering under the shade of the lime trees where Mrs. Van Santen was pouring out tea.
The lady threw at Gerard the apprehensive glance with which she greeted everyone who approached her whom she did not know well. He looked at her narrowly, but there was nothing in the least suspicious about her; she was a plain-featured, motherly woman who gave the impression of being more used to a simple, homely style of life than to the state which now surrounded her; and the gentleness with which she evidently tried to live up to the new life prepossessed him in her favor.
She smiled at him rather shyly, and invited him to take a seat beside her.
“I’m new to this,” she said, with a strong American accent, as she poured him out a cup of tea; “to all this company, I mean. I’m used to a quieter sort of life altogether; and your smart British society folks make me shiver some!”
“Well, I hope you won’t look upon me as belonging to the people who make you shiver,” said Gerard, much taken with her gentle looks and her homely form of speech. “So you don’t like us, Mrs. Van Santen, so much as your friends on the other side of the Atlantic?”