“ ‘Sincerely, your possible neighbour,
“ ‘Vesta Donelly.’ ”
“I didn’t suppose it would put you out very much to have a jolly sort of girl here for a few days at this dull time of the year,” said Evan, regretfully, rather than apologetically, and dodging the real issue.
“It isn’t the trouble. I would welcome any one with open arms who cared to come here in the first three weeks of March (as to the fourth week, barring a blizzard, my mind goes back to the earth and revels in the task of keeping the temperature of the hot-beds equable, an occupation not naturally appreciated by company). But knowing the country as we do, can you possibly consider March a good month for exploiting real estate? Especially a March like the present, that starts by being snowbound in the fields, and so sloppy in the roads that the wheels of anything but father’s stanhope are mired and won’t go round, while down in the valley the light sleigh almost turned into a boat and floated this morning.
“There is nothing attractive of any kind that I know of for sale, and if there were, it would repel people at this season. Even the Cortrights’ trim, lovely house, standing between the great oaks, looked, this afternoon, like a belated and bedraggled straggler, propped up between two policemen waiting for the patrol wagon to come for it. Besides, at best, this Mrs. Terence Donelly is looking for the impossible with true Western fervour.
“One must grow up with a place and feel rooted in its earth to love it in March; she won’t have the ghost of an idea what the garden means to us by looking at it now, for it isn’t there, only its spirit, and that, like everything dead, is invisible except to the eyes of those that love.
“What is Vesta like? How old is she, and who were her people?” I asked, for optimistic Evan was beginning to look depressed, which is something wholly against the rule.
Terence Donelly was a college chum of Evan’s at Oxford, and is as fascinating and warm-hearted as only a well-bred Irishman knows how to be. He had visited us many times before the Western trip that had buckled into double harness a spirited roadster who had travelled straight and true in single harness without either check-rein or blinders for nearly forty years. Consequently, Mrs. Terence was an object of an interest that became intense upon the thought of meeting her.
“She is small, her hair is light brown and her eyes flash and dance so that I don’t remember anything else about them,” said Evan, slowly, shutting his eyes, as if searching his memory for an accurate picture. “I happen to know that she is twenty-six, though she does not look it by five or six years. I haven’t made up my mind about her disposition; one moment she has an almost pathetic expression as though she needed sympathy and protection, and then her eyes blaze, and she runs her hand through her front hair until it stands on end, and she reminds one of something as unapproachable as a coil of slender live wire.