"I want you to tell me all about your farm," she said. And then, in a rather loud aside, "I can't stand that woman, and I wish your son hadn't been so conscientious in asking her."
While emptiness and ennui prevailed on the terrace in front of the Mandarin-room, there were a pair of wanderers in the shrubbery, whose talk was unleavened by worldliness or pretence of any kind. Allan had stolen away from the smokers in the dining-room, and was escorting Suzette and her friend Bessie Edgefield round his modest domain—the shrubberies, the paddocks nearest the house, which had been planted and educated into a kind of park; the greenhouse and hothouse, which were just capacious enough to supply plenty of flowers for drawing-room and dinner-table, but not to grow grapes or peaches. Everything was on a modest, unassuming scale. Allan felt that after the mansion and gardens at Discombe, his house suggested the abode of a retired shopkeeper. A successful hosier or bootmaker might create for himself such a home. Wholesale trade, soap, or lucifer matches, or cocoa would require something far more splendid.
Modest as the place was, the two girls admired, or seemed to admire, all its details—the conifers of thirty years' growth, the smiling meadows, the fawn-coloured cows. A sunny September afternoon showed those fertile pastures and trim gardens at their best. Allan felt exquisitely happy walking about those smooth lawns and gravel paths with the girl he loved. At every word of approval he fancied she was praising the place in which she would be content to live. After that avowal of his the other day, it seemed to him that her kindness meant much more than it had meant before she knew her power. She could not be so cruel as to mock him with the promise of her smiles, her sweet words, her undisguised pleasure in his company. Yes, he was perfectly happy. He thought of her refusal the other day as only the prelude to her acceptance. She had not said "No;" she had only said "Not yet."
Bessie Edgefield was one of those sweetly constituted girls whom Nature has especially created to be a third party in a love affair; never to play the heroine in white satin, but always the confidante in white muslin. She walked beside her friend, placid, silent, save for an occasional monosyllable, and was of no more account than Suzette's shadow.
"The Roebucks are taking leave," exclaimed Suzette, looking across the lawn to the groups on the terrace. "Mr. Carew, I'm afraid you are a sadly inattentive host."
"Have I neglected you, Miss Vincent?"
"You have neglected Mrs. Roebuck, which is much worse. She will be talking of your want of savoir vivre all over Matcham."
"Let her talk. She has been boring my mother with a cruelty worthy of Torquemada. She forgets that torture was illegal in England even in Bacon's time. See, they are all going away; but you and the General and Miss Edgefield must stay to tea, even if the Vicar is too busy to stop."
The Vicar had quietly vanished, to resume the round of parish duties, quite content to leave his Bessie in comfortable quarters. The Roebucks were going, and the Morningtons were following their example; but General Vincent had no objection to stop to tea if his daughter and Miss Edgefield desired him to do so.
He was smoking a cheroot, comfortably seated in a sheltered part of the terrace—a corner facing south, screened from east and north by an angle of the house, where the Mandarin-room projected from the main building—and he was absorbed in a discussion of Indian legendary lore with Mr. Carew, who owned to some knowledge of sanscrit, and had made Eastern fable and legend an especial study.