"Indeed?" Grace replied. "I did not know he meant to go as far." Then she added, with emphasis, "If you wish it, I hope we may."
She sought no explanation from Mordaunt; she respected his reticence, understood his rather forced hilarity at moments, and then his long lapses into silence. It was better so; she did not much believe in confidences.
Mr. Barham met his English visitor at the Fellbridge Station, and while her maid waited to accompany the porter who was to wheel her box on a truck down the street, the minister conducted Grace to the rectory.
He was a tall, handsome man of five-and-forty, with hair still untouched with gray, which may have helped to make a middle-aged face, in which high cheek-bones and a prominent chin were the chief defects, look somewhat hard. The silver that years scatters on our head is a wondrous softener, as silver, in life, is so often found to be.
He greeted the young Englishwoman with a grave, old-fashioned courtesy to which she was unaccustomed.
"This visit is a pleasure to which Mrs. Barham has been looking forward for several weeks, Miss Ballinger. You will take us as we are, simple folk, living in a simple way. You can have expected nothing else in coming to a minister's house, so I make no apologies. We will make you as comfortable as we can, and show you what little there is to see in our neighborhood."
They stopped before a green-painted wooden house, in no way dissimilar from its fellows in the long, wide street. It stood in a "yard," perhaps a quarter of an acre square, with half a dozen stripling trees and a bush or two irregularly dispersed round it. Fence or paling there was none, dividing it from the road or from its neighbors. It had a "piazza," or covered balcony, running along the front, in which grew two shrubs in pots, but there was no border or bed of brown frozen earth telling of a past-summer's garden. The exterior was certainly discouraging.
Mrs. Barham, who had been watching at the window for them, came to the door herself, but not before it had been opened by an Irish parlor-maid, with an aroma of Tipperary still hanging about her. Her very hair seemed to have a brogue. But behind her shone the sweet, glad face of Saul's mother, and two delicate hands which Grace declared she would have recognized anywhere, were extended to greet her.
The interior of the house presented some pleasant features, indicative of work and home life. On this account it seemed to Grace more cheerful than many of the sumptuous dwellings she had visited in New York. The "parlor" had books on one table, Mrs. Barham's work-basket on another, her writing-materials and letters on a third. There was no open fire-place, and the heat from the stove struck Grace as oppressive, coming from the sharp air of the February afternoon. But she was beginning to get acclimatized to the atmosphere of American hotels, railway-cars, and most private houses, Brackly being an exception.
She threw open her fur jacket as she sat down.