“No, thank you,”—Claudia spoke firmly—“I like to do everything for myself.”
“Well, you know best, only don’t crowd your experiments. Here is your room,” went on Miss Cartwright, opening a door at the end of a passage; “your room, that is, unless you like the other better. I hope they have brought up all your things. Dinner is at seven, because Emily has a meeting to-night. You will have to accommodate yourself to meetings. By the way, Harry Hilton is staying with us, and he says he once met you at the Grants’.”
“I dare say,” returned Claudia, indifferently. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, he is a cousin on the other side of the house, one of the Hiltons of Thornbury, you know—or perhaps you don’t know—and is here a good deal—on and off. Now I will leave you in peace.”
She was gone, and Claudia, barely glancing at her pretty room, sat down on the window-seat, and stared enthusiastically at the strip of silver light which marked the course of the river.
It gave a charm and variety which would otherwise have been wanting, for though the country round was fertile and smiling, it had neither breadth nor distinctive features. At one point, indeed, there was a tantalising peep of vanishing blue hills, but the foliage of the elms was heavy, and the trees themselves stiff with the cutting which deprived them of their lower branches. After a long silent gaze, Claudia broke out into an exclamation—
“Oh, how one could improve it!” she cried, leaning forward, and eagerly tracing lines and curves in the air with a sweeping finger. “What opportunities they have thrown away! To raise the ground there by a long beautiful slope of grass, to plant out those hideous chimneys, and cut, cut, cut! They will—they must—let me do it, and then one could get the most splendid effects of light out of the water. Emily and her meetings and her blue ribbons may be an infliction, but I could bear almost anything for the sake of having a river to study.”
She jumped up eagerly, unlocked a bag, and took out a book full of blank pages, in which she was presently alternately writing and drawing, not pausing so much as to look at the garden below when she heard voices beneath her window.
Meanwhile Philippa Cartwright ran downstairs to a small morning-room where she wrote notes with vigour until her sister, Anne, the eldest of the three, a woman rather heavily built, and with a kindly sympathetic face, looked in upon her.
“Is Claudia come?”