“Wait here awhile, Campanula,” he said, “and then follow me in. I think I know them, but I will go and see.”
“Yes,” said Campanula.
He walked to the house and kicked his garden shoes off in the veranda, noting the fact that the Foreign Devils had committed the unspeakable outrage of entering with their shoes on.
“Richard!” cried the tall woman, advancing to him with outstretched hand as he entered the room where they were. “Why, you’ve grown!” She spoke as though they had parted yesterday, but her voice had an hysterical quaver, then she presented her cheek to him for a cousinly kiss.
“This is Richard Leslie,” said the woman, turning to the little stout man in tweed. “We grew up together; that’s why I’m so tall, I suppose. Dick—my husband George. Gracious, Dick, where are your chairs and things? Have you nothing to sit down on?”
“Only the floor,” said Leslie, fetching some square cushions and placing them on the matting. “See, this is how it’s done,” and he sat down on one of the cushions, whilst his companions followed suit.
Jane du Telle, once Jane Deering, was, despite her vivacity and carelessness of manner, evidently in a state of high nervous tension.
Leslie, notwithstanding the years that had passed since their last meeting, saw in her mentally little change. She was the same Jane who had once hacked his shins, when they were boy and girl together, up in Scotland, and then flung herself on his neck in a burst of repentance and tears. Emotional, good-hearted, selfish—giving herself away one moment, but always saved the next by a latent discretion that was to her flighty nature as a gyroscope. The same Jane with whom he had fished for salmon and played at tennis in the past, seated before him now on a floor in Japan, chattering of everything and nothing just in the old familiar way.
“And that’s the fellow she has married!” thought he, as he glanced across at George du Telle, a podgy, red-headed little man, a globe-trotting Briton of the most blatant description.
“How did you know I was here?” asked he, after Jane had somewhat talked her hysterical feelings off.