“Yes,” said Jim’s mother, hopefully, “if the little study of the Tuscan woman in the field of olives finds a purchaser.”
“One feels sure it will,” said Cheriton, with perhaps a better grounded optimism.
Cheriton was justified of it, however. Jim Lascelles contrived a few days later to sell that not specially significant little work for forty pounds. In his own judgment, and in that of others, this sum was every penny of what it was worth. It was so obviously a picture in which he was seeking to find the right way in that carelessly happy era before the right way had come to him so miraculously.
The sale of the Tuscan woman in the field of olives was curiously providential coming when it did, for Jim himself had abandoned all hope of the sea for that year. Yet neither he nor his mother was really surprised that a corner was found for her in one of the lesser reception rooms at Cheriton House.
“It is a great bargain,” said Jim’s mother. “Really she is worth so much more.”
“A modest fiver represents her merits,” said Jim, who was without illusions upon the subject.
Nevertheless Jim and his mother proposed to spend a whole month in Normandy upon the proceeds of the sale. Cheriton, who had inherited a certain quantity of suppressed gout along with the ancestral acres, made his annual pilgrimage to Harrogate to drink the waters; and the Hill Street ménage was removed to a dilapidated fortress in Wales. And it was to this retreat, by a signal act of grace, of which few would have suspected its authoress to be capable, that Muffin was summoned from Slocum Magna to spend a fortnight with her sister, “who, all things considered, had been a good girl.”
Miss Perry wept large round tears of delight when she communicated this glad news to Tobias. That stay of her solitude had, by the guilty connivance of Miss Burden, been provided during the second week of his sojourn in the vast metropolis with a more hygienic and commodious structure than a wicker basket.
Muffin arrived at Pen-y-Gros Castle on a sultry August afternoon, in a somewhat antiquated fly which took an hour to come from the railway station at a place called Dwygyfy, or words to that effect. It appeared that the train was due to arrive at that center of civilization at seven o’clock the previous evening, but for some mysterious reason did not arrive there until the next day. At least, according to Muffin’s thrilling narrative of her adventures upon the Cambrian railway, she had found herself at a quarter to eleven the previous night at a place called Llan-something, where they have the mountains, with only four shillings and ninepence in her chain purse, together with a return ticket from Dwygyfy, and a canary in a wicker cage, which she had brought from Slocum Magna for Aunt Caroline.
However, “All’s well that ends well,” as Shakespeare says. Muffin accepted the situation in the philosophical spirit for which she had already acquired a reputation. She curled herself upon three chairs in the first-class waiting-room at the railway station at Llan-something, with Polly’s luggage basket for her pillow and the canary by her side, and she awoke just in time to catch the train to Dwygyfy about noon the next day.