“Where does your woman come from? I didn’t see a house for miles round.”
“No, you can’t see the place, but there’s a little farmstead, tucked away in a hollow about three miles from here, which provides us with cream and butter and eggs—-and with our char-lady.”
Jean surveyed with satisfaction a rapidly mounting pile of delicately browned toast, creaming with golden butter.
“There, that’s ready,” she announced at last. “I do hope Judy and Co. will arrive soon. Hot buttered toast spoils with keeping; it gets all sodden and tastes like underdone shoe leather. Do you think they’ll be long?”
Burke threw a glance at the grandfather’s clock ticking solemnly away in a corner of the kitchen.
“It’s half-past four,” he said dubiously. “I don’t think we’ll risk that luscious-looking toast of yours by waiting for them. I’m going to brew the tea; the kettle’s boiling.”
“Won’t Judith think it rather horrid of us not to wait?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Judy and I never stand on any ceremony with each other. Any old thing might happen to delay them a bit.”
Jean, frankly hungry after her spin in the car through the invigorating moorland air, yielded without further protest, and tea resolved itself into a jolly little tête-à-tète affair, partaken of in the shelter of the verandah, with the glorious vista of the Moor spread out before her delighted eyes.
Burke was in one of those rare moods of his which never failed to inspire her with a genuine liking for him—when the unruly, turbulent devil within him, so hardly held in check, was temporarily replaced by a certain spontaneous boyishness of a distinctly endearing quality—that “little boy” quality which, in a grown man, always appeals so irresistibly to any woman.