“Ah, but you never come to tea with me, though I am always asking you. I’m afraid you are not very fond of children.”
“I am not used to them, and I don’t think that children like people who are out of the habit of associating with them,” answered Mrs. Porter deliberately. “I never know what to say to a child. My life has been too grave and too solitary for me to be fit company for children.”
The Curate and his wife took leave and went briskly down the steps to the lane, and Theodore made a little movement towards departure, but Cuthbert Ramsay lingered, as if he were really loth to go.
“I am absolutely in love with your cottage, Mrs. Porter,” he said; “it is an ideal abode, and I can fancy a lady of your studious habits being perfectly happy in this tranquil spot.”
“The life suits me well enough,” she answered icily, “perhaps better than any other.”
“You have a piano yonder, I see,” he said, glancing through the half-open door to an inner room with a latticed window, beyond which a sunlit garden on a bit of shelving ground sloped upwards to the edge of the low hillside, the garden vanishing into an upland meadow, where cows were seen grazing against the evening light. This second sitting-room was more humbly furnished than the parlour in which they had been taking tea, and its chief feature was a cottage piano, which stood diagonally between the lattice and the small fireplace.
“You too are musical, I conclude,” pursued Cuthbert, “like little Miss Kempster.”
“I am very fond of music.”
“Might we be favoured by hearing you play something?”
“I never play before people. I played tolerably once, perhaps—at least my master was good enough to say so. But I play now only snatches of music, by fits and starts, as the humour seizes me.”