Robinette clapped her hands. “Of course I do; it accounts for this game; it just makes all the difference.––Why have you come to Stoke Revel; couldn’t you help it?”
A twinkle passed from the blue eyes to the brown ones.
“I am here on business connected with the estate.”
“For how long?”
“An hour ago I thought all might be completed in a few days, but these affairs are sometimes unaccountably prolonged!” (Was there another twinkle? Robinette could hardly say.) They were half-way across the river now. She leaned over and looked at herself in the water for a moment.
Lavendar rested on his oars, and began to rub the palms of his hands, smiling a little to himself as he bent his head.
“Yours is an odd Christian name,” he said. “I’ve never heard it before.”
“Then you haven’t visited your National Gallery faithfully enough,” said Mrs. Loring. “Robinetta is one of the Sir Joshua pictures there, you know, and it was a great favourite of my mother’s in her girlhood. Indeed she saved up her pin-money for nearly two years that she might have a good copy of it made to hang in her bedroom where she could look at it night and morning.”
“Then you were named after the picture?”