General Kemp turned to his wife inquiringly, as if asking for a lead, and Lucy intercepted the look which passed between them. "Why, mother," she cried, "I shouldn't think of doing such a thing! I've been looking forward to to-day for ever so long! I know what you are thinking"—she flushed vividly, "but I'm sure Captain Laxton is much too old a friend to bear me a grudge, or to feel any annoyance as to meeting me. After all, he need not have come back——" and without giving either of her parents time to answer, she ran out of the room.
General Kemp was much taken aback. This was the first time he had heard Lucy allude to Captain Laxton's affection for herself, or to the offer which she had rejected. To his mind such an allusion savoured almost of indelicacy. He did not like to think his daughter guilty of over-frankness, even to her father and mother.
"Can it be, Mary," he said, puzzled, "that she's thinking of Laxton after all?"
Mrs. Kemp shook her head. She knew very well why Lucy had mentioned her lover—that his image had been evoked in order to form as it were a screen between herself and what she had divined to be her mother's motive in suggesting that she should stay at home, but it would be hopeless to try and indicate such feminine subtleties to Lucy's father.
In the country, as in life, there are always many ways of reaching the same place. The pleasantest carriage road to Whiteways lay partly through the Priory park, and it was that which was chosen by Mrs. Boringdon and Mrs. Kemp. Lucy and her father preferred a less frequented and lonelier path, one which skirted for part of the way the high wall of James Berwick's property, Chillingworth.
They had now left this place far behind, and were riding slowly by the side of a curving down: Captain Laxton had evidently gone on before, or deliberately chosen to linger behind, and the father and daughter were alone. Soon they left the road for the short turf, broken here and there with hawthorn bushes; and Lucy, cheered by the keen upland air, was making a gallant effort to bear herself as she had always done on what had been such happy hunting days last winter. Already she could see, far away to her left, a broad shining white road, dotted with carriages, horsemen and horsewomen, and groups of walkers all making their way up towards the castellated gate-way which frowned on the summit of the hill above them.
When the father and daughter reached the large circular space, sheltered on one side by two wind-blown fir-trees, they found that they were rather late, and so had missed the pretty sight of the coming of the huntsman and his hounds over the brow of the down. Lucy made her way at once through the crowd close to where Mrs. Boringdon's low pony-carriage was drawn up just beneath the high stone gate-way, next to that of Mrs. Sampson, the Chancton rector's wife, who had weakly consented to bring Miss Vipen. Even Doctor McKirdy had vouchsafed to grace the pretty scene, and he was sitting straightly and lankily on the rough old pony he always rode, which now turned surprised and patient eyes this way and that, for the doctor had never before attended a meet of the S.S.H.
As yet Lucy could see nothing of Captain Laxton or of Boringdon, and she felt at once relieved and disappointed. Perhaps Oliver was too busy to give up a whole day to this kind of thing, and yet she knew he always enjoyed a day with the hounds, and that he had theories concerning the value of sport in such a neighbourhood as this. She reminded herself that if he had not been really very busy, more so than usual, he would certainly have found time to come to the Grange during his mother's absence from Chancton.
As these thoughts were coming and going through her mind in between the many greetings, the exchange of heavy banter such an occasion always seems to provoke, she suddenly heard Boringdon's voice, and realised that he was trying to attract her attention. Lucy's pony, feeling the agitation his young mistress was quite successfully concealing from the people around her, began to quiver and gave a sudden half-leap in the air.