"You are terribly Scotch, Jan," he said one day. "I sometimes wonder whether anything could make you really feel."
Jan looked at him with a sort of contemptuous wonder that caused him to redden angrily, but she made no reply.
He was her guest, he was a broken man, and she knew well that they had not yet even approached their real difference.
Two people, however, took Hugo's attitude of profound dejection in the way he expected and
liked it to be taken. These were Mr. Withells and Hannah.
Mr. Withells did not bear Jan a grudge because of her momentary lapse from good manners. In less than a week from the unfortunate interview in the nut-walk he had decided that she could not properly have understood him; and that he had, perhaps, sprung upon her too suddenly the high honour he held in store for her.
So back he came in his neat little two-seater car to call at Wren's End as if nothing had happened, and Jan, guiltily conscious that she had been very rude, was only too thankful to accept the olive-branch in the spirit in which it was offered.
He took to coming almost as often as before, and was thoroughly interested and commiserating when he heard that poor Mrs. Tancred's husband had come home from India and been taken ill almost immediately on arrival. He sent some early strawberries grown in barrels in the houses, and with them a note conjuring Jan "on no account to leave them in the sickroom overnight, as the smell of fruit was so deleterious."
Hannah considered Hugo's impenetrable gloom a most proper and husbandly tribute to the departed. She felt that had there been a Mr. Hannah she could not have wished him to show more proper feeling had Providence thought fit to snatch her from his side. So she expressed her admiration in the strongest of soups, the smoothest of custards, and the most succulent
of mutton-chops. Gladly would she have commanded Mrs. Earley to slay her fattest cockerels for the nourishment of "yon poor heartbroken young man," but that she remembered (from her experience of Fay's only visit) that no one just home from India will give a thank-you for chickens.