“Who would ever have thought that the thin, pale girl with the colourless hair would be transformed into—you?” she cried, “with your stately walk and dignified figure! You make me look so small, and so frivolous and empty-headed, that I shall end by being jealous of you with my own husband as well as my boy!”
Rhoda frowned painfully.
“I don’t like to hear you say those things even in fun. Caryl looks upon me just as he would upon a nurse who was kind to him. He speaks of you with bated breath, as if you were a goddess. And it’s the same with Sir Robert. All I can do is to make myself useful, and I have to work hard to keep my hold upon both of them; I have to keep a smile always ready for little Caryl and to indulge his whims; to keep my place in his heart I have to be always working, working hard. As for Sir Robert, I’m afraid his appreciation of me is confined to my capacity for making out his handwriting, and his admiration is given only to my beautiful capitals, and not to me. If I thought that you meant that I presumed upon my position——”
“But I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!” cried Lady Sarah briskly. “I’m unfeignedly thankful for what you have done for both of them, and there never was in this world a person less capable of jealousy than I. But you are too modest. For I see Sir Robert lets you have the key of his gallery. I’m sure he’d rather die than trust it to me.”
Rhoda’s fair face became suffused with a hot blush.
“I won’t let him give it me again,” she said quickly.
Lady Sarah put a peremptory little hand upon her arm.
“Yes, yes, you will,” she said. “You are much more to be trusted than either Sir Robert or I. For he is so absent-minded that he might leave it in a shop in payment for a postage stamp, while I am so dreadfully careless that I should certainly leave it sticking in the door. Now come, don’t be cross, but put on your hat and I’ll take you to the Priory with me and introduce you to my old mother. She’s rather a dear when you come to know her well, though you may find her uninteresting at first.”
Rhoda would have made excuses, but Lady Sarah was accustomed to have her own way, and upon the whole Rhoda was not displeased to have an opportunity of seeing Vale Priory and its occupants.
And so, before mid-day, she and Lady Sarah got into the motor-car, and after climbing the long hill out of Dourville, and down the other side of it into the vale, they reached the pretty, old-fashioned mansion which had been in the family of the Marquis of Eridge for a couple of centuries.