The surprise to him was, without doubt, the greater, for she knew him at once, and he for a second did not recognize her. Her extreme English air—the straw hat tied under her chin and the face it framed, so decidedly altered, bewildered him. His first greeting, mentally, before he spoke aloud to her, was masculine. "Why, her beauty! What in heaven's name had she done with it?"
"What are you doing here?"
They both asked it at once, and the lady having lived so long in an insular country was adept in its possibilities of great hospitality as well as of freezing out an unwelcome visitor. She froze the poor gentleman and then, touched by his utter bewilderment and his innocence of wilful intrusion, she smiled more humanly.
"Won't you, since you are here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup of tea?"
She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one has a better right!"
"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit us. You see we are two."
The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.
"She's a perfect dear, isn't she—a dear. So you are riding her then? Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."
As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly, willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled. "Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."
"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived in, as, of course, you know."