“I am sure that dear Ben has the true interests of all of us next his heart.”
He paused at the door, smiling at her.
“I am off to the Home Farm. I shall pass through the rose garden, and I shall pick the best rose for you. Where is Lionel?”
“I don’t know.”
Lionel happened to be at the Vicarage.
He had definitely made up his mind that he could say to Joyce what he kept from his own mother and father, and he knew, instinctively, that her advice, at such a moment, would help him enormously. He could, it is true, have laid his case before the Parson, a sound adviser, but he shrank from such an ordeal. Hamlin was too brutally outspoken. To place his perplexities before him meant listening to a one-sided indictment of landed gentry in general and the Squire in particular.
Chance, so often complaisant to lovers, ordained that Lionel should find Joyce alone. The Parson was attending a Diocesan Conference in Salisbury, and his eldest son had accompanied him. Also, it happened to be raining; so Joyce received Lionel in her own den, where she kept a lathe, a sewing-machine, rolls of flannel and long-cloth, many books, and her collections of eggs and butterflies. Lionel was invited to sit down and light his pipe.
“This is like old times,” he remarked.
“Isn’t it?”