"It's so hot, bending over the stove on a day like this," said poor Janet apologetically.
"Well, for the Lord's sake make yourself respectable before Jones and Carter turn up!" he replied. "I've put some chairs out, but I don't know where you keep your tableclothes."
"Oh, have you? Oh, thank you, father! I'll do the rest!" she said, feeling that she had been right in her judgment of him all along, and that a rough exterior hid a heart of gold.
The garden of the Dower House sloped down to the stream separating it from Palings, but a previous tenant had levelled part of the upper ground into a shallow terrace. Here White had dragged several chairs, and a weather-beaten garden table, disposing them in the shade cast by the house. Janet, who had a slightly depressing habit of making yards of crochet-lace in her spare time, spread a cloth, heavy with this evidence of her industry, over the table, and set the tea-tray down on top of it. Like Ermyntrude, she wished that the rhododendrons and the azaleas were in flower, for she was an indifferent gardener, and the prospect included only a few sickly-looking dahlias, some Michaelmas daisies, one or two late-flowering roses, and a thicket of funereal shrubs that ran from the corner of the house down to the stream. However, it seemed unlikely that either Mr. Jones or Wally Carter was coming to admire the garden, so beyond casting a wistful glance at the blaze of colour on the southern slopes of the Palings garden, which she could see through a gap in the bushes, she wasted no time in idle repinings, but went indoors to take her scones out of the oven.
When she came out on to the terrace again, she had changed her workaday garb for a dress of a clear blue, startlingly unsuited to her rather sallow complexion, and had powdered her nose. She found that Mr. Jones had already arrived, and was deep in conversation with her father. This conversation broke off abruptly upon her appearance, and Mr. Jones hoisted himself out of his chair with a grunt, and shook hands with her.
He was a fat man, with a jowl, and a smile that was altogether too wide and guileless to be credible; and his notion of making himself agreeable to women was to talk to them with an air of patronage mixed with gallantry.
Janet's rigid standards of the civility due to a guest compelled her to receive Mr. Jones's sallies with outward complaisance, but when, from her chair facing down the garden, she caught a glimpse of Wally descending the path to the bridge between the banks of rhododendrons on the opposite slope, she rose with rather obvious relief, and said that she could see Mr. Carter coming, and would go and make the tea.
Her father, who had been treating her with the politeness he reserved for public use, forgot, in the irritation of finding his cigarette-case empty, that in the presence of strangers she was his indulged daughter, and got up, demanding to know why she had not put out a box of cigarettes.
"Oh dear, didn't I?" said Janet distressfully. "I'll get it, shall I?"
"Not on my account, I beg!" said Mr. Jones, holding up a plump hand.