"Neither do I," she said, "but Paul does, so we shall have it! Yes, it is cool in here. Give me a cigarette, John, will you?"
He did so, and they sat in almost unbroken silence, smoking. Presently the door-bell rang, and voices were heard outside.
"That's Moreton and Maud," Griselda explained, without rising. "They have motored up from Burnham Beeches to see Guy."
"You ought to go up to them, oughtn't you?" he asked gently.
"No; they will be all right, and they'll love hearing the songs, and Paul will tell them we are in the garden." Again they were silent.
The air was extremely oppressive in spite of the rising wind, and Grisel's head ached faintly. Every now and then one of the long lace curtains would blow into the room and writhe about as if reaching for something, to sink back listlessly into its place.
"How heavy the scent of those lilacs is," the girl said after a while, glancing at a big bowl of them on the table, and Barclay raised his head suddenly, with a new look in his face.
"Yes; that brings back to me a story that I've been thinking of telling you. I think I will tell you now, Grisel," he said. "Something that happened in my youth. My father was a parson, and there were six of us children. My mother died when I was about eight, and an old aunt of ours, my father's sister, came and lived with us and brought us up. She was a good woman, absolutely without imagination, and she looked rather like Miss Breeze. When I think of my Aunt Susan I always see her behind a kind of barricade of baskets full of mending of all kinds. She spent the greater part of her life with a boy's stocking drawn up over her left arm and a needle full of wool in her right hand. She did her best by us, poor woman, but she bored us, every one, and I suppose she could not have been very wise about our health, because before I left home four of us had died, two—the twins, who had never been very strong—of pneumonia, and the other two of diphtheria. It is not very interesting, but it explains just a little the way I felt that day——" He broke off.
"I was just twenty-one," he went on, smiling at her, "an awkward colt of a boy, too big for my clothes, and too hungry for my father's income, and one day my sister Celia, the only other one of us who lived to grow up——"