"I hope not. So you think that an occasional wigging does her good."
"Rather! It does us all good. I know I get on a high horse every now and then, and start galloping off, and then Master Oliver cracks his whip, and down we come in the dust, and I know it is good for me."
He liked her, liked her thoroughly, with her mixture of music and sharpness; above all, he liked her for not apologising for her perfectly fair criticism of her friend. He was a man who inclined to be very impatient of unnecessary apologies.
"Well, well," he said, as, in answer to a message brought up by Jessie, they went downstairs. "Miss Perkins seems to have played a rather important part in all our lives, doesn't she? I am afraid my poor Grisel could never compete with her in the matter of womanly perfection."
"Oh, I don't suppose Dorothy is as bad—as good—as Oliver thinks," the girl laughed. "No girl ever was, but still——"
The first thing that met Sir John's eyes as he opened the dining-room door was Oliver Wick's face. Oliver sat opposite him, and as Jenny went into the room Barclay stood for a moment watching the scene of greeting and exclamations and introductions, and it struck him that there was something very odd in Wick's face as he, too, looked on after kissing his sister.
The young man looked at once triumphant and touched, and in an odd way, despite the triumph, hurt.
Barclay's impression that something very strange was going on in the room strengthened as he advanced to the table. Then Mrs. Walbridge, whose back had been towards him, and over whose chair Jenny was leaning, turned and held out her hand. Barclay stared almost open-mouthed, then he fell back a step, glanced sharply at Wick, whose complexity of expression had simplified, he saw, to one of sheer pride of achievement and delight.
It was, indeed, Mrs. Walbridge whose hand her old adorer now held in his, but it was an entirely new Mrs. Walbridge. A beautifully dressed, much younger, shyly self-possessed woman, whose faint blush of pleasure in his plainly-shown surprise gave her an oddly reminiscent look of the girl in the garden of so many years ago.
Her hair, which since he had found her again had been carelessly smoothed back, and dulled from lack of care, now shone almost with the old lustre, and its bewitching curliness was made the highest use of. Her metamorphosis was so complete and so striking that it would have been foolish to try to ignore it, and he found himself saying simply as he released her hand: