"Why should you be anxious? I am not going to be angry or disagreeable at your brioches—should you make any."
She still refused, lightly but persistently; and he saw that she had made up her mind.
"I begin to understand," he said, with an offended air; and there was never any further talk of Suzette as an accompanist.
Geoffrey was seldom at home in the daytime after this refusal, and life at the Manor dropped back into the old groove. Mrs. Wornock and Suzette spent some hours of every day together; and, now that the weather often made the garden impossible, the organ and piano afforded their chief occupation and amusement. Suzette was enthusiastic, and pleased with her own improvement under her friend's guidance. It was not so much tuition as sympathy which the elder woman gave to the younger. Suzette's musical talent, since she left her convent, had been withering in an atmosphere of chilling indifference. Her father liked to be played to sleep after dinner; but he hardly knew one air from another, and he called everything his daughter played Rubinstein.
"Wonderful fellow that Rubinstein!" he used to say. "There seems no end to his compositions; and, to my notion, they've only one fault—they're all alike."
Suzette heard of Geoffrey, though she rarely saw him. His mother talked of him daily; but there was a regretful tone in all her talk. Nothing at Discombe seemed quite satisfactory to the son and heir. His horses were failures. The hunting was bad—"rotten," Geoffrey called it, but could give no justification for this charge of rottenness. The sport might be good enough for the neighbours in general; but it was not good enough for a man who had run the whole gamut of sport in Bengal, under the best possible conditions. Geoffrey doubted if there was any hunting worth talking about, except in the shires or in Ireland. He thought of going to Ireland directly after Christmas.
"He is bored and unhappy here, Suzette," Mrs. Wornock said one morning, when Suzette found her particularly low-spirited. "The life that suits Allan, and other young men in the neighbourhood, is not good enough for Geoffrey. He has been spoilt by Fortune, perhaps—or it is his sad inheritance. I was an unhappy woman when he was born, and a portion of my sorrow has descended upon my son."
This was the first time she had ever spoken to Suzette of her past life or its sorrows.
"You must not think that, dear Mrs. Wornock. Your son is tired of this humdrum country life, and he'll be all the better and brighter for a change. Let him go to Ireland and hunt. He will be so much the fonder of you when he comes back."
Mrs. Wornock sighed, and began to walk about the room in a restless way.