There were no steps leading to the front door except a single one, so the visitor entered directly into the hall which divided the downstairs. On the left side was a long room with a raftered ceiling and high narrow windows, and on the right Captain MacDonnell's den—a small room littered with a young soldier's belongings. Beyond were the dining room and kitchen and upstairs four bedrooms. As the house was so small Captain MacDonnell had turned his great, old-fashioned barn into extra quarters for guests. Between the house and the flower beds and the barn was an open space of green lawn with an occasional tree, and beyond was a tennis court. The place was tiny and simple compared to Kent House and yet had great charm.
Jack and Olive and Frieda arrived before the other guests. They soon discovered that Mrs. Naxie—Captain MacDonnell's housekeeper—had arranged to serve tea in his living room.
It was through Jack's suggestion that the arrangement was altered.
"Please don't tell Mrs. Naxie, Bryan, that I spoke of it," she volunteered as soon as she beheld the preparations, "but don't you think the summer in England too short for people to spend an hour indoors when they can avoid it?"
And Captain MacDonnell good naturedly agreed.
As a matter of fact, Jack always poured tea for him when he had guests and she was able to be present, so she felt sufficiently at home to make her request.
Captain MacDonnell's mother was an Irishwoman and his father a Scotchman. But they had both died when he was a little boy and he had spent the greater part of his boyhood with an old bachelor friend of his father's, who was his own guardian and had lived in the very house of which he was now the master.
As neighbors he and Frank Kent had played together when they were small boys and had later gone to the same public school. Then Frank's illness sent him to the United States, where he was introduced into the lives of the Ranch girls, at about the same time his friend Bryan MacDonnell entered Cambridge and afterwards the army. But whenever he and Frank were together the old intimacy had continued, and Jack's coming had only seemed to turn their friendship into a three-cornered one.
"Frank told me to tell you that he was sorry not to be able to come over with us this afternoon, Bryan," Jack announced a few moments later, when the four of them had gone out to select a place where tea could be served, "But for some reason or other he telephoned that he could not come down from London today. I don't know what is wrong with Frank lately. He has never been so absorbed in political matters. I am afraid Frieda and Olive will think he neglects his family disgracefully. Please tell them, Bryan, that he is sometimes an attentive husband."
But as Captain MacDonnell did not answer at once, Olive remarked in a more serious tone than Lady Kent had used: