“That means perhaps that you wonder I can care for such frivolous work as this,” she said, interpreting his recent thought, when his eyes first lighted on her satin-lined basket with its rainbow-hued silks. “It seems inconsistent, I dare say; but this work has helped me to quiet my brain many a time when I have felt myself on the brink of madness. These slow regular stitches, the mechanical movement of my hand as the flowers grow gradually, stitch by stitch, through the long melancholy day, have quieted my nerves. I cannot read. Books give me no comfort, for my eyes follow the page while my mind is brooding on my own troubles. It is better to sit and think quietly, while I work. It is better to face my sorrow.”
“Have you been long alone?”
“No. It is only three weeks since Lady Jane went back to Swanage; and she comes to see me two or three times a week. My father and mother come as often. You must not think I am deserted. Every one is very good to me.”
“They have need to be.”
Again there was a brief interval of silence, and then Juanita closed her basket, and lifted her earnest eyes to her cousin’s face.
“You know all about the Strangways?” she inquired.
“I have heard a good deal about them from one and another. People who live in the country have long memories, and are fond of talking of the lords of the soil, even when the race has vanished from the land. I have heard elderly men tell their after-dinner stories about the Strangways at my father’s table.”
“You know the family portraits at Cheriton?”
“The pictures in the hall? Yes. I have wondered sometimes that your father should have kept them there—effigies of an alien race.”
“I hate them,” exclaimed Juanita, shuddering. “I always had an uncomfortable feeling about them, a feeling of strange cold eyes looking at us in secret enmity; but now I abhor them. There is a girl’s face—a cruel face—that I used rather to admire when I was a child, and sometimes dream about; and on the last night but one—of—my happy life—I looked at that picture with Godfrey, and told him my feeling about that face, and he told me the pitiful story of the girl whose portrait we were looking at. The creature had a sad life, and died in France, poor and broken-hearted. Two hours later I heard a strange step upon the terrace—while Godfrey and I were sitting in the library—a stealthy, creeping step, coming near one of the open windows, and then creeping away again. When we looked out there was no one to be seen.”