CHAPTER XII
Milly, too, had not been without a sharp reminder that the leaves in her life so blank to her, had been fully inscribed by another. She hardly yet felt mistress of the house, but it was pleasant to rest and read in the low, white-panelled drawing-room, which lowered awnings kept cool, although the afternoon sun struck a golden shaft across the flowering window-boxes of its large and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed pieces of needlework which harmonized with them.
Presently the door-bell rang and a Mr. Fitzroy was announced by the parlor-maid, in a tone which implied that she was accustomed to his name. He looked about the age of an undergraduate and was extraordinarily well-groomed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being in a riding-dress. His sleek dark hair was neatly parted in the middle and he was clean shaven, when to be so smacked of the stage; but his manners and expression smacked of nothing of the kind.
"I'm awfully glad to find you at home, Mrs. Stewart," he said. "I've been lunching at the Morrisons', and, you know, I'm afraid there's going to be a row."
The Morrisons? They lived outside Oxford, and Milly knew them by sight, that was all.
"What about?" she asked, kindly, thinking the young man had come for help, or at least sympathy, in some embarrassment of his own.
"Why, about your acting Galatea. Jim Morrison's been a regular fool about it. He'd no business to take it for granted that that was the part I wanted Mrs. Shaw for. Now it appears she's telling every one that she's been asked to play the lead at the Besselsfield theatricals; and, by Jove, he says she is to, too!"
Milly went rather pale and then quite pink.
"Then of course I couldn't think of taking the part," she said, gasping with relief at this providential escape.