On the afternoon of his return from Newmarket, however, he began to wonder whether, after all, Adela had not more in common with him than he had ever expected. He had lunched at the club, had plunged down into the City to enquire about some investments, it had begun to rain, and he had returned with the weight of that gloomy day full heavily upon him.
He did not, as a rule, have tea, but to-day he needed company, and he found Adela in the little sitting-room next to the library, a little room with faded wall-paper, faded pictures (groups, some of them, of himself and Vincent and Richard at Eton and Oxford), faded arm-chairs and faded chintzes—a nice, cosy, friendly room, full of old associations and old hopes and despairs.
This room did not often see either Lady Adela or John, but to-day Norris, for reasons best known to himself, had put tea there and, to both of them, as they sat over the fire with the great house so still and quiet about them, the shabby intimacy of the little place was grateful.
John, disturbed, himself, out of his normal easy geniality, noticed that Adela also was disturbed.
That dry and rather gritty assurance that had all her life protected her from both the praise and abuse of her fellow-men and women was, to-day, absent. She seemed really grateful to John for coming to have tea with her to-day. He wondered whether she felt as he did that this war, with all its horrors, foreboded, in some manner, special disasters upon the Beaminster family, as though it were a portent, to be read of all men, of the destruction and ruin of that family.
"Poor Adela," he thought, "she's very plain. If she asks me to help her I will. She's got something on her mind."
"Rachel's here," Lady Adela said, looking at her brother nervously.
"Now?"
"Yes, she's with mother. She came to say good-bye to her. She and Roddy are going down to Seddon to-morrow."
"Yes, I know——" said John.