That he did not dislike her she felt sure; and a woman rarely makes a mistake over a man’s personal attitude towards her. But for some reason, it seemed to her, he was afraid to let himself like her! It was as though he were anxious to bolt and bar the door against any possibility of friendship between them. From whichever way she looked at it, she could find no key to the mystery of his behaviour. It was inexplicable.
Only one thing emerged from the confusion of thought; the lost glamour of that night at Montavan had returned—returned with fresh impulse and persuasiveness. And when at last she fell asleep, it was with the beseeching, soul-haunting melody of Valse Triste crying in her ears.
CHAPTER X—OTHER PEOPLE’S TROUBLES
JEAN woke to find the chill, wintry sunlight thrusting in long fingers through the space between the casements and the edges of the window-blinds. At first the unfamiliar look of a strange bedroom puzzled her, and she lay blinking drowsily at the wavering slits of light, wondering in vague, half-awake fashion where she was. Gradually, however, recollection returned to her, and with it a lively curiosity to view Staple by daylight. She jumped out of bed and, rattling up the blinds on their rollers, peered out of the window.
There was a hard frost abroad, and the stillness which reigned over the ice-bound country-side reminded her of the big Alpine silences. But here there was no snow—no dazzling sheet of whiteness spread, with cold, grey-blue shadows flung across it Green and shaven the lawns sloped gently down from a flagged terrace, running immediately beneath her window, to the very rim of the frozen lake that gleamed in the valley below. Beyond the valley, scattered woods and copses climbed the hillside opposite, leafless and bare save where a cluster of tall pines towered in evergreen defiance against the slate of the sky.
In the farther distance, beyond the confines of the manor park itself, Jean could catch glimpses of cultivated fields—the red Devon soil glowing jewel-like through filmy wisps of morning mist that still hung in the atmosphere, dispersing slowly as though loth to go. Here and there a little spiral of denser, blue-grey smoke wreathed its way upwards from the chimney of some thatched cottage or farmhouse. And back of it all, adumbrated in a dim, mysterious purple, the great tors of Dartmoor rose sentinel upon the horizon.
Jean’s glance narrowed down to the sloping sward in front of the house. It was all just as her father had pictured it to her. On the left, a giant cedar broke the velvet smoothness of mown grass, its gnarled arms rimmed with hoar-frost, whilst to the right a tall yew hedge, clipped into huge, grotesque resemblances of birds and beasts, divided the lawns from a path which skirted a walled rose garden. By craning her neck and almost flattening her nose against the window-pane, she could just make out a sunk lawn in the rose garden, and in its centre the slender pillar of an ancient sundial.
It was all very English and old-fashioned, breathing the inalienable charm of places that have been well loved and tended by successive generations. And over all, hills and valleys, park and woodland, lay that faint, almost imperceptible humid veil wherewith, be it in scorching summer sunshine or iron frost, the West Country tenderly contrives to soften every harsh outline into something gracious, and melting, and alluring.