“I don’t know nothing about blondes and brunettes, sir,” replied Maria, with truth. “But they do say ‘twill bring you luck if so be a dark woman’s the first to cross your threshold after the New Year’s in, and it seems only reasonable that ‘twould be the same when you go into a new house.”
Unfortunately Maria’s hopes were not destined to be fulfilled, as the first person to cross the threshold of Oldstone Cottage after Ann’s arrival was Caroline Tempest, the rector’s sister. “Miss Caroline,” as she was invariably called by the villagers, was a flat-chested, colourless individual with one of those thin noses which seem to have grown permanently elongated at the point in the process of prying into other people’s business. Her hair, once flaxen, was now turning the ugly yellowish grey which is the fair woman’s curse, and her eyes were like pale blue china beads.
She appeared, accompanied by the rector, about half an hour after Maria had brought in tea, and seemed overwhelmed to discover that Ann herself had only just arrived.
“I really must apologise,” she declared, in the voice of a superior person making a very generous concession. “I quite thought you were expecting your sister yesterday, Mr. Lovell. I told you so, didn’t I, Brian?” She appealed to her brother, who nodded rather unhappily. “And we thought we’d like to call as soon as possible and welcome you to the parish.”
Ann didn’t believe a word of it.
“She knew perfectly well you were expecting me to-day,” she declared when, later on, she and Robin found themselves alone again. “Though I haven’t the slightest doubt she told that nice brother of hers just what she wished him to believe. She simply wanted to have first look at me so as to be able to give the village to-morrow a full, true, and particular account of what I’m like.”
However, she replied to Miss Caroline’s apologies with the necessary cordiality demanded by the occasion and, ringing for Maria, ordered fresh tea. The rector protested.
“No, no,” he said hastily. “You must be far too tired to want visitors when you’ve only just come off a long journey. We’ll pay our call another day.”
Brian Tempest was the very antithesis of his sister—tall and somewhat ascetic-looking, with a face to which one was almost tempted to apply the word beautiful, it was so well-proportioned and cut with the sure fineness of a cameo. His dark hair was sprinkled with grey at the temples, and beneath a broad, tranquil brow looked out a pair of kindly, luminous eyes that were neither all brown nor all grey. Later, when she knew him better, Ann was wont to inform him that his eyes were a “heather mixture—like tweed.” Small, fine lines puckered humorously at their corners, and there was humour, too, in the long, thin-lipped mouth.
Robin and Ann brushed aside his protest with a hearty sincerity there was no mistaking. Whatever each of them might feel concerning Miss Caroline, they were in complete accord in the welcome they extended to her brother. He was no stranger to Robin. The latter had put up at the village inn during the time occupied by Maria Coombe in “cleaning down” the Cottage and making it habitable, and the rector had dropped in to see him in a characteristically informal, friendly fashion on more than one occasion.