Pawley sighed, shrugging his shoulders. In a tired voice, he said quietly:
“The Extons are much liked, Lady Selina.”
Lady Selina closed the Estate ledger, standing very erect, unconsciously assuming the pose of her late husband. But she spoke pleasantly, suppressing a rising exasperation. Pawley’s pale face affected her. And he had grown old in her service, a loyal friend. Certainly she owed him consideration. After tea, she might talk with him—alone.
“Well, well, the letter can be written any time before eight. I shall give my dear people their tea.” She moved slowly to the open window, turning on the threshold, smiling confidently. “I am not afraid of becoming unpopular with them.”
As she swept out, Cicely whispered to Pawley:
“All is well. She won’t write the letter. Ah, doctor, you didn’t half back me up.”
He took both her hands, looking gravely into her eager face.
“I am an old man, my dear, and I am devoted to your mother. Shall we follow her on to the lawn?”
III
The lawns of Upworthy Manor sloped from the house to the topiary garden. This topiary garden was famous for its size and construction. In pre-war days, some ten men were kept constantly at work from March to October trimming the yews and mowing and rolling the grass alleys. Lady Selina regarded it with reverence. Cicely hated it, but dared not say so. The trimness and primness of it all affected her oddly. Apart from the waste of labour which the care of such an absurdity involved, it symbolised what she had learned at school to dislike and distrust—artificial clipping of Nature. A yew, left to its own devices, was a glorious tree, intimately associated with the history and expansion of England, furnishing the long bows of Agincourt even as later the great oaks were transformed miraculously into the wooden walls that kept our shore inviolate. To turn a yew into a peacock seemed to Cicely a monstrous perversion. And, as a child, looking out of her nursery window by moonlight, she envisaged the dark beasts and birds coming to life, and preying mercilessly upon beloved creatures such as lambs and puppies and kittens. There was a legend, too, in the family, babbled by nursemaids, that the Chandos who had laid out the topiary garden had designed it as a sort of prison for a young and beautiful wife of whom he was morbidly jealous. She had never been suffered to stray far from the walled-in alleys and tunnels. The story had a tincture of truth in it, no more, quite enough to fire the fancy of an imaginative child.