The girl tossed her head and pouted her lips.
“A person isn’t used to waiting on foreigners,” she muttered.
Mr. Goring’s only reply to this remark was to pinch her arm unmercifully. He then pushed her aside, and entering the kitchen, walked rapidly through to the front of the house. The front parlour in the Priory was nothing more or less than the old entrance-gate of the Cistercian Monastery, preserved through four centuries, with hardly a change.
The roof was high and vaulted. In the centre of the vault a great many-petalled rose, carved in Leonian stone, seemed to gather all the curves and lines of the masonry together, and hold them in religious concentration.
The fire-place—a thing of more recent, but still sufficiently ancient date—displayed the delicate and gracious fantasy of some local Jacobean artist, who had lavished upon its ornate mouldings a more personal feeling than one is usually aware of in these things. In place of a fire the wide grate was, at this moment, full of new-grown bracken fronds, evidently recently picked, for they were still fresh and green.
In front of the fire-place stood Lacrima with the letter in her hand. Had Mr. Goring been a little less persuaded of the “meekness” of this young person, he would have recognized something not altogether friendly to himself and his plans in the strained white face she raised to him and the stiff gloved hand she extended.
He begged her to be seated. She waved aside the chair he offered, and handed him the letter. He tore this open and glanced carelessly at its contents.
The letter was indeed brief enough, containing nothing but the following gnomic words: “Refusal or no refusal,” signed with an imperial flourish.
He flung it down on the table, and came to business at once.
“You mustn’t let that little mistake of Auber Great Meadow mean anything, missie,” he said. “You were too hasty with a fellow that time—too hasty and coy-like. Those be queer maids’ tricks, that crying and running! But, bless my heart! I don’t bear you any grudge for it. You needn’t think it.”