She flung out the silver laugh again.
"After all these years! After one has grown old and withered and wrinkled—and has a grown-up daughter."
He answered with a dazzling young-man-of-the-world bow and air. He had not been to Eton and Oxford and touched the outskirts of two or three London seasons, as a boy beauty and a modest Apollo Belvidere in his teens, without learning a number of pleasant little ways.
"You are exactly as you were the morning you came into the Gardens dressed in crocuses and daffodils. I thought they were daffodils and crocuses. I said so to my mother afterwards."
He did not like her but he knew how her world talked to her. And he wanted to hear her speak—The Lady Downstairs—who had not "liked" the soft-eyed, longing, warm little lonely thing.
"All people say of you is entirely true," she said. "I did not believe it at first but I do now." She patted the seat of the small sofa she had dropped on. "Come and sit here and talk to me a few minutes. Girls will come and snatch you away presently but you can spare about three minutes."
He did as he was told and wondered as he came nearer to the shell fineness of her cheek and her seraphic smile.
"I want you to tell me something about my only child," she said.
He hoped very much that he did not flush in his sometimes-troublesome blond fashion then. He hoped so.
"I shall be most happy to tell you anything I have the honour of knowing," he answered. "Only ask."