“A place like this must seem to you to be very unhomelike,” he was saying, as he lounged on a low chair not very far from her. “The girls didn’t like it at all at first. I suppose it’s a retrograde step in civilization. Servants are decidedly of that opinion; we have a great difficulty in getting them to stay here. The reason seems to me that they miss the congenial gossip of the area door. At this moment we are without a domestic. I found she compensated herself for disadvantages by stealing my tobacco and cigars. She went to work with such a lack of discretion—abstracting half a pound of honeydew at a time—that I couldn’t find any sympathy for her. Moreover, when charged with the delinquency, she became abusive, so very abusive that we were obliged to insist upon her immediate departure.”
“Do you think she smoked?” asked Monica laughingly.
“We have debated that point with much interest. She was a person of advanced ideas, as you see; practically a communist. But I doubt whether honeydew had any charms for her personally. It seems more probable that some milkman, or baker’s assistant, or even metropolitan policeman, benefited by her communism.”
Indifferent to the progress of time, Bevis talked on with his usual jocoseness, now and then shaking his tawny hair in a fit of laughter the most contagious.
“But I have something to tell you,” he said at length more seriously. “I am going to leave England. They want me to live at Bordeaux for a time, two or three years perhaps. It’s a great bore, but I shall have to go. I am not my own master.”
“Then your sisters will go to Guernsey?”
“Yes. I dare say I shall leave about the end of July.”
He became silent, looking at Monica with humorous sadness.
“Do you think your sisters will soon be here, Mr. Bevis?” Monica asked, with a glance round the room.
“I think so. Do you know, I did a very silly thing. I wanted your visit (if you came) to be a surprise for them, and so—in fact, I said nothing about it. When I got here from business, a little before three, they were just going out. I asked them if they were sure they would be back in less than an hour. Oh, they were quite sure—not a doubt about it. I do hope they haven’t altered their mind, and gone to call somewhere. But, Mrs. Widdowson, I am going to make you a cup of tea—with my own fair hands, as the novelists say.”