The rest of the year was spent by the elder woman at Marston Lydiate, the great Somersetshire country-seat to which she had been brought as a bride, and for which she now paid rent to her husband's successor. To Wantley the arrangement had been a painful one. He would have much preferred to let the place to strangers, and he had always refused to go there as Lady Wantley's guest.
As he stood, silent, by one of the high windows of the Picture Room, he remembered suddenly that the next day, August 8th, was his birthday, and that no human being, save a woman who had been his mother's servant for many years, was likely to remember the fact, or to offer him those congratulations which, if futile, always give pleasure. The bitterness of the thought was perhaps the outcome of foolish sentimentality, but it lent a sudden appearance of sternness and of purpose to his face.
Mrs. Robinson, coming into the room at that moment, was struck, for a moment felt disconcerted, by the look on her cousin's face. She was surprised and annoyed that he had returned so soon from the visit which, of course unknown to him, she had herself arranged he should make, in order that he might be absent at the time of the assembling of her ill-assorted guests.
Penelope feared the young man's dispassionate powers of observation; and as she walked down the long room, at the other end of which she saw first her mother's seated figure, and then, standing by one of the long, uncurtained windows, the unwelcome form of her cousin, her heart beat fast, for the little scene with Cecily Wake, added to other matters of more moment, had set her nerves jarring. She dreaded the evening before her, feared the betrayal of a secret which she wished to keep profoundly hidden. Still, as was her wont, she met danger halfway.
'I am glad you are back to-night,' she said, addressing Wantley, 'for now you will be able to play host to Sir George Downing. I met him abroad this spring, and he has come here for a few days.'
'The Persian man?' She quickly noted that the young man's voice was full of amused interest and curiosity, nothing more; and, as she nodded her head, assurance and confidence came back.
'Well, you are certainly a wonderful woman.' He turned, smiling, to Lady Wantley, who was gazing at her daughter with her usual almost painful tenderness of expression. 'Penelope's romantic encounters,' he said gaily, 'would fill a book. Such adventures never befall me on my travels. In Spain a fascinating stranger turns out to be Don Carlos in disguise! In Germany she knocks up against Bismarck!'
'I knew the son!' she cried, protesting, but not ill-pleased, for she was proud of the good fortune that often befell her during her frequent journeys, of coming across, if not always famous, at least generally interesting and noteworthy people.
'And now,' concluded Wantley, 'the lion whom most people—unofficial people of course I mean'—he spoke significantly—'are all longing to see and to entertain, is bound to her chariot wheels!'
'Ah!' she cried eagerly, 'but that's just the point: he has a horror of being lionized. He's promised to write a report, and I suggested that he should come and do it here, where there's no fear of his being run to earth by the wrong kind of people. I don't suppose Theresa Wake knows there's such a person in the world as "Persian Downing."'