They were deeply grateful to Sir Robert, who insisted that they should leave their daughter where she was until she was fully recovered, a suggestion which poor Mrs. Pembury, the harassed mother of half a dozen children, gratefully accepted, it being arranged that Dr. Pembury should cycle over every day to see how his daughter was getting on.
Within a few days Rhoda, very pale still, and with deep dark lines under her large, plaintive, blue eyes, was sitting at the window of the room that had been assigned to her, permitted for the first time to leave her bed.
She was a tall, thin slip of a girl, not yet fully developed, but languid and almost sickly of appearance by reason of the rapidity of her recent growth. At seventeen she was five feet seven inches in height, with a lean, fair-skinned face, a mass of pale golden hair that looked as if a silver veil had been thrown over it, and a look of listlessness that told of weakly health.
She confessed to Bessie that she had only had her hair “up” within the last month, and that, in her present enfeebled condition, she preferred to leave it loose again, tied with a black ribbon, to the fatigue of doing it herself, or even of having it done for her.
So that she looked like a child as she sat at the open window, with her white dressing-gown on, and her head thrown back against the pillows provided for her.
In the garden below were two figures, upon whom her attention was fixed with interest so deep that Bessie watched her in furtive surprise, wondering at the look of vivid excitement which was making the blue eyes glow and the white skin flush.
The old nurse looked out, and saw that the objects of the girl’s interest were Sir Robert Hadlow, sauntering in the grounds in his linen coat and broad-brimmed hat, and his handsome young ward, Jack Rotherfield, a tall, well-made man of two and twenty, whose dark-skinned, beardless face and curly black hair and dark eyes had earned him the reputation of the handsomest man in Kent.
The expression upon the girl’s face, as she gazed out at the two men, was so unmistakably one of admiration of the most vivid kind, that Nurse Bessie smiled indulgently.
“A good-looking fellow, isn’t he?” she said with a nod in the direction of the two figures.
To her surprise, the girl turned towards her with a look of ecstasy in her thin face.