At the thought of this last possibility his face kindled with anticipation. "Cold, Helen?" he queried, and when she replied "Yes, rather," he said jubilantly: "I shouldn't be surprised if it's started to freeze already."
Then for many minutes he gazed out through the carriage window at the pleasant monotony of the Essex countryside, and in a short while he felt her head against his shoulder. She was sleeping. "I do love her!" he thought triumphantly, giving her a side-glance. And then the sight of a pond with a thin coating of ice gave him another sort of triumph.
[INTERLUDE]
CHRISTMAS AT BEACHINGS OVER
I
"BEACHINGS OVER, near Framlingay, Essex. Tel. Framlingay 32. Stations: Framlingay 2½ miles; Pumphrey Bassett 3 miles."
So ran the inscription on Lady Speed's opulent bluish notepaper. The house was an old one, unobtrusively modernised, with about a half-mile of upland carriage-drive leading to the portico. As Helen saw it from the window of the closed Daimler that had met them at Framlingay station, her admiration secured momentary advantage of her nervousness.
In another moment Speed was introducing her to his mother.
Lady Speed was undoubtedly a fine woman. "Fine" was exactly the right word for her, for she was just a little too elderly to be called beautiful and perhaps too tall ever to have been called pretty. Though she was upright and clear-skinned and finely-featured, and although the two decades of her married life had seemed to leave very little conspicuous impression on her, yet there was a sense, perhaps, in which she looked her age; it might have been guessed rightly as between forty and fifty. She had blue eyes of that distinctively English hue that might almost be the result of gazing continually upon miles and miles of rolling English landscape; and her nose, still attractively retroussé, though without a great deal of the pertness it must have had in her youth, held just enough of patricianly bearing to enable her to manage competently the twenty odd domestics whose labours combined to make Beachings Over habitable.
She kissed Helen warmly. "My dear, I'm so pleased to meet you. But you'll have to rough it along with us, you know—I'm afraid we don't live at all in style. We're just ordinary country folks, that's all.... And when you've had your lunch and got refreshed I must take you over the house and show you everything...."