"Richard, I wish you'd build," she said, in her earnestness unconscious of the unceremonious character of her address. "Iles ought to have done that before now. But he is old and timid, and his one idea has been to save. You know this Brockhurst property alone would carry eight or ten more families. There's plenty of work. It needn't be made. It is there ready to hand. Give them good gardens, allotments if you can, and leave to keep a pig. That's infinitely better than extravagant wages. Root them down in the soil. Let them love the place—tie them up to it——"
"Your socialism is rather quaintly crossed with feudalism, isn't it?" Dickie remarked.
He drew himself forward, slipped down off the sofa, stood upright. And then, indeed, the cruel disparity between his stature and her own—for tall though she was, he, by right of make and length of arm, should evidently have been by some two or three inches the taller—and all the grotesqueness of his deformity, were fully disclosed to Honoria. For the second time that day, her tact, her presence of mind, her ready speech, deserted her. She backed a little away from him.
And Richard perceived that. It is not easy to be absolutely philosophic. Something of his old anger revived towards Miss St. Quentin. He shuffled forward a step or two, and, steadying himself with one hand on the arm of the sofa, reached down to pick up his crutches. But his grasp was not very sure just then. He secured one. To his intense annoyance the other escaped him, falling back on the floor with a rattle. Then, instantly, before he could make effort to recover it, Honoria's white figure swept down on one knee in front of him. She laid hold of the crutch, gave it him silently, and rose to her full height again, pale, gallant, stately, but with a quivering of her lips and nostrils, and an amazement of regret and pity in her eyes, which very certainly had never found place there heretofore.
"Thanks," Richard said.—He waited just a minute. He too was amazed somehow. He needed to revise the position. "About those eight or ten happy families whom you wish to root so firmly in the soil, and the housing of them—are you busy to-morrow morning?"
"Oh no—no"—Honoria declared, with rather unnecessary emphasis.
Generosity should surely be met by generosity. Dickie leaned his arm against the arm of the sofa, and looked up at the speaker. Her transparent sincerity, her superb chastity—he could call it by no other word—of manner and movement, even of outline—the slight angularity of strong muscle as opposed to soft roundness of cushioned flesh—these arrested and impressed him.
"I had Chifney up from the stables this afternoon and made my peace with him," he said. "He was very full of your praises, Honoria—for the cousinship may as well be acknowledged between us, don't you think? You have supplemented my lapses in respect of him, as of a good deal else."—Richard looked away to the door of Lady Calmady's bedroom. It stood open, and Katherine came from within with some books, and a silver candlestick, in her hands.
"My dears," she said, "do you know it grows very late?"
"All right," he answered, "we're making out some plans for to-morrow."—He looked at Honoria again. "Chifney engaged he and Chaplin would find a horse, between them, which could be trusted to—well—to put up with me," he said. "I promised to go down and have breakfast with dear Mrs. Chifney at the stables, but I can be back here by eleven. Would you be inclined to come out with me then? We could ride over to that burnt land and have a poke round for sites for your cottages."