He had wished, instinctively, to appear like those renouncing heroes on the stage who always wring the heart of the audience to soft music when they are having the first interview with the Beloved after she is Lost for Ever. And he had appeared among a heap of apples with a disordered ham-sandwich over his eyes.
But one advantage of it all was, nothing now seemed to matter. When he came downstairs that morning, he had dreaded keeping his appointment with Mrs. Atterton about a church window as a hurt man dreads the touch of a sore finger on an open wound; now, he jogged up the long drive feeling sure that nothing could happen at Millsby Hall which would make the slightest difference to him.
“Mrs. Atterton?” he said at the door, with as little anxiety as if he were asking for Mrs. Thorpe. And he followed a servant into the big morning-room all full of light and people and flowers and sunshine—a sort of temple to the jolly spirit of the Atterton family—with no more sense that he was standing on holy ground than as if he had found Mr. Thorpe smoking a pipe in his leather-covered arm-chair.
“No, please don’t send my pony round to the stables—I must only stay a few minutes—I am on my way to Marshaven.”
“Often on your way to Marshaven,” chuckled the irrepressible Bill. “But your cousins aren’t the ordinary sort, more kin than kind. These are more kind than kin, aren’t they?”
“They are the daughters of the first husband of my aunt by marriage,” said the Vicar of Gaythorpe, who was in no mood for jesting.
But he and Bill had been such good friends that the young gentleman failed to realise this; and, taking Andy’s dignified reply for a joke, he laughed uproariously.
“Ha-ha! ‘If Peter’s mother married’——”
“Hush,” interrupted Mrs. Atterton, but smiling too, “it’s a lucky thing you go back to Cambridge to-morrow. You need toning down a little. Now, Mr. Deane, as we have not much time, perhaps we ought to begin about the window at once.”
Andy rose, supposing she would lead him to a more retired room, but that was not the Attertons’ way; so she only beckoned him into a corner, while Bill continued to laugh and talk with Norah by the window.