There was a small copper kettle singing on the old-fashioned hob, and there was a covered dish of toast in the capacious fender. Miss Newton’s dinners were ever of the slightest, but she was a sybarite as to her tea and toast. No cheap and powdery mixture; no “inferior Dosset” for her. She made her brew with a dainty precision which Theodore admired, while she went on talking.
“Do you like the colour of the walls? Yes, I painted them. And you like that paper on the ceiling? I papered it. I am rather a dab at carpentering, too, and I put up all those shelves and brackets, and I covered the chairs, and stained the boards round that old Turkey carpet; and then, after a day’s hard work, it was very pleasant to go and stroll about among the bookshops of an evening and pick up a volume here and there till I got all my old friends about me. I felt like Elia; only I had no Bridget to share my pleasure.”
She seated herself opposite to him with a wicker table in front of her, and began to pour out the tea. He wondered to find himself as much at home with her as if he had known her all his life.
“It is very good of you to receive me so cordially,” he said, presently. “I feel that I come to you as an unauthorized intruder.”
“Can you guess why I was willing to receive you?” she asked, looking at him intently and with a sudden gravity. “Can you guess why I didn’t telegraph to forbid your coming?”
“Indeed, no, except because you are naturally kind.”
“My kindness had nothing to do with it. I was willing to see you because of your name. It is a very familiar name to me—Dalbrook, the name of the man who bought the house in which she was born. Poor soul, how she must have hated him, in her desolate after years. How she must have hated the race that ousted her from the home she loved.”
“You are talking of Evelyn Strangway?”
“Yes, she was my first pupil, and I was very fond of her—all the fonder of her, perhaps, because she was wayward and difficult to manage: and because I was much too young and inexperienced to exercise any authority over her.”
“It is of her I want to talk to you, if you will allow me.”