“My dear Tibby, it’s quite obvious that your vocation is not to the religious life. Fancy you in a convent! I can imagine you suggesting to the Reverend Mother that a change in the time of saying divine office would be desirable, or at all events that it should be varied on alternate days; and I can see you going off for long and rampageous days in the country, just for a change.”
Miss Tibbutt shook her head.
“Oh, no!” she said gravely. “I should hear the big voice there.”
“You’d hear it speak through quite a number of human voices, anyhow,” returned the Duchessa.
There was a silence. She wondered what odd coincidence had led Tibby to such a subject. If it were not a coincidence, it must be a kind of thought transference. Almost unconsciously she had been seeing a tall, thin, brown-faced man marching off in the early morning hours to his work in a garden. She had seen him busy with hoe and spade, till the bell over the stables at the Hall announced the dinner hour. She had seen him again take up his implements at the summons of the same bell, working through the sunshine or the rain, as the case might be, till its final evening dismissal. Above all, she had seen him taking his orders from Golding, a well-meaning man truly, and an exceedingly capable gardener, but—well, she pictured Antony as she had seen him in evening dress on the Fort Salisbury, as she had seen him throwing coppers to the brown-faced girl outside the Cathedral at Teneriffe, as she had seen him sitting in the little courtyard with the orange trees in green tubs, and the idea of his receiving and taking orders from Golding seemed to her quite extraordinarily incongruous.
Yet until Miss Tibbutt had introduced the subject, she had been more or less unaware of these mental pictures.
“Besides,” she remarked suddenly, and quite obviously in continuation of her last remark, “it entirely depends on what you have been brought up to, I mean, of course as regards the question of being a servant. The question of a religious is entirely different.”
“Oh, entirely,” agreed Miss Tibbutt promptly. “You can always get another place as a servant if you happen to dislike the one you are in.”
“Yes,” said the Duchessa, slowly and thoughtfully.
A sudden little anxious pang had all at once stabbed her somewhere near the region of the heart. Would that be the effect of that afternoon’s meeting? Most assuredly she hoped it would not be, and equally assuredly she had no idea she was hoping it; verily, her feeling towards Antony was one of mingled anger, indignation, and mortified pride.