"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes—isn't it really too delightful?"
He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have ever seen."
"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many others but it's more perfect, more like a home."
Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him. Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess. She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so, and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes—it was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all; they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their profound and deeply circled gray.
"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment. Then—"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV. rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men. There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so? And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court? Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace balustrade—or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you wouldn't as a girl does."
A girl—with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.
"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them. Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told me so."
She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another question.
"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West Rooms'?"
She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless, showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her voice as she said: