A larger tea-table than usual had been set out in the inner drawing-room, with two teapots, and a tempting array of dainty biscuits and tea-cakes, such as the idle mind loveth. It was Miss Fausset’s afternoon for receiving her friends, and from four o’clock upwards carriages were heard to draw up below, and loquacious matrons with silent daughters dribbled into the room and talked afternoon tea-talk, chiefly matters connected with the church of St. Edmund’s and the various charities and institutions associated with that edifice.
It seemed very slow, dull talk to the ears of Pamela, who had been vitiated by sporting society, in which afternoon tea generally smelt of cartridges or pigskin, and where conversation was sometimes enlivened by the handing round of a new gun, or a patent rat-trap, for general inspection. She tried to make talk with one of the youngest ladies present, by asking her if she was fond of tennis: but she felt herself snubbed when the damsel told her she had one of the worst districts in Brighton, and no time for amusements of any kind.
Everybody had taken tea, and it was nearly six o’clock when the feminine assembly became suddenly fluttered and alert at the announcement of two gentlemen of clerical aspect: one tall, bulky, shabby, and clumsy-looking, with a large pallid face, heavy features, heavier brows; the other small and dapper, dressed to perfection in a strictly clerical fashion, with fair complexion and neat auburn beard. The first was Mr. Maltravers, Vicar of St. Edmund’s; the second was his curate, the Honourable and Reverend Percival Cromer, fourth son of Lord Lowestoft. It was considered a grand thing for St. Edmund’s that it had a man of acknowledged power and eloquence for its vicar, and a peer’s son for its curate.
Mr. Cromer was at once absorbed by a voluble matron who, with her three daughters, had lingered in the hope of his dropping in after vespers; but he contrived somehow to release himself from the sirens, and to draw Miss Ransome into the conversation. Miss Fausset in the meantime made the Vicar known to Mildred.
“You have often heard me speak of my niece,” she said, when the introduction had been made.
Mildred was sitting apart from the rest, in the bay-window of the inner room. She had withdrawn herself there on pretence of wanting light for her needlework, the same group of azaleas she had been working upon at Enderby, but really in order to be alone with her troubled thoughts; and now Miss Fausset approached her with the tall, ponderous figure of the priest, in his long threadbare coat.
She looked up, and found him scrutinising her intently under his heavy brows. It was a clever face that so looked at her, but it did not engage her sympathy, or convince her of the owner’s goodness, as Clement Cancellor’s face had always done.
“Yes, I have heard you speak of Mrs. Greswold, your only near relative, I think,” he said, addressing Miss Fausset, but never taking his eyes off Mildred.
He dropped into a chair near Mildred, and Miss Fausset went back to her duty at the tea-table, and to join in the conversation started by Mr. Cromer, which had more animation than any previous talk that afternoon.
“You find your aunt looking well, I hope, Mrs. Greswold?” began the Vicar, not very brilliantly, but what his speech wanted in meaning was made up by the earnestness of his dark gray eyes, under beetling brows, which seemed to penetrate Mildred’s inmost thoughts.