Miss Perry returned from Slocum Magna with a little start. She removed her finger from her lip, yet her thoughts were not of famous duchesses.
In the meantime the redoubtable Caroline said nothing. All the same she was watching everything with those relentless eyes of hers.
Miss Perry exhibited neither surprise nor embarrassment at being summoned so peremptorily from Slocum Magna by such a magnificent specimen of the human race. Perhaps her wonderful blue eyes opened a little wider and she may or she may not have hoisted a little color; but it really seemed as though her thoughts were more concerned with bread and jam than with Lord Cheriton.
“Will you pardon an old worshiper of your famous ancestress if he asks your name?” said he. “I hope and believe it is a legitimate curiosity.”
Miss Featherbrain made an effort to cease wool-gathering. She smiled with a friendliness that would have disarmed a satyr.
“My name is Araminta,” she drawled in her hopelessly ludicrous manner, “but they call me Goose because I am rather a Sil-lay.”
Cheriton gave a chuckle of sheer human pleasure. He was to be pardoned for feeling that a new delight had been offered to an existence which had long exhausted every æsthetic form of joy.
“Your name is Araminta,” he repeated by a kind of hypnotic process, “but they call you Goose because you are rather a silly.”
Miss Perry rewarded Lord Cheriton with an indulgent beam. It assured him that he had had the good fortune to interpret her correctly. It was not easy for that connoisseur to withdraw his enchanted gaze. However, at last he contrived to do so. He turned to his old friend.
“Caroline,” said he, “the fairies have fulfilled my wish. I have always wanted to meet a Gainsborough in the flesh and to hear what she had to say for herself. And now I have done so I know why Gainsborough painted ’em.”