They went together up the lane to the farm with as much decorum as was consistent with the possibility of being discovered by some watcher in the fields, and they had breakfast face to face at an old Tudor table in one of the panelled rooms of the farmhouse, and beneath the old oak beams—a lovely room that had undergone no change in even the most trifling detail for three hundred years. The bowls of wallflowers on the table and on the lattice shelf were of blue delft, and the plate-rack on the wall held some dishes of the same colour.
“You suppose all this is old?” he said, looking around.
“Oh, no; but it wasn’t bought in my lifetime,” she replied. “I can show you in an account book exactly what was paid for everything. The date of the last entry in the book is the ‘Eve of the Feast of the Purification, 1604.’”
“Three hundred years ago. But that’s nothing in the history of your family. Have you a ledger that goes back to the Heptarchy?”
“I’m afraid that that one is mislaid. But the eggs are fresh; if we don’t boil them now they will be three hours old at nine.”
“You might have some relic of the Heptarchy, Priscilla.”
“Alas! nothing remains from that date except our name.”
“And yet you are content to submerge it in the mushroom-growth Wingfield? Have you no reverence for the past?”
“Just now I confess that I am thinking more of the future. Oh, the future, Jack, my boy—the future!”
She laid a hand upon his shoulder and stood in front of him in the attitude of a true comrade.