Without a word Lord Wilfrid reached forward and started the engine. He seemed to realize that from laughter there is no appeal. In unbroken silence, but with undiminished skill, he drove them home to the old Garden house. Mary began to feel that he was in earnest in his feeling for her mother and, tender-hearted ever, to pity him. She longed to hear the story of his woes. But, glancing at her mother’s pretty unruffled face, which looked young and contented under its shadowy veil, she felt that if admirers were coming to seek her out, titled admirers from across seas, her hands would be full indeed. How should she and Jane, not to speak of Florimel, take care of a girl-mother whom lords sought, when they were all too young to think of romance, except when it was presented to them within book covers, its aroma one with printers’ ink?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“HE NOTHING COMMON DID OR MEAN”
“Lord Wilfrid,” “Willoughby,” “the chauffeur,” “the nobleman”—Mary found herself experimenting in her thoughts with the various guises in which this man should appear in them—drove up to the other gate of the Garden place and into the driving entrance. Mary guided him; her mother had wrapped herself in a silence more impenetrable than her motor veil, but Mary felt sure that she was enjoying herself exceedingly.
“The lordly chauffeur,” as Mary amused herself by deciding to call him to herself, stopped the car, shut off the gas, and the engine sank into silence. He then got out, opened the tonneau door, and handed out the elder and younger ladies with a courtesy equalled only by his extreme gravity.
“You are to come in, Lord Wilfrid,” said Mrs. Garden, passing him up the steps.
Mary really felt sorry for him. “He hasn’t done anything except be foolish, and I suppose that’s to be expected if he’s in love,” she thought generously. “We have not breakfasted, Lord Kelmscourt,” she said, with her smile that everybody found comforting. “I hope you are a little hungry, or we shall be embarrassed; it is late for us, in summer. We shall have great appetites.”
Lord Wilfrid Kelmscourt proved no exception to the rule; he quite brightened as he received Mary’s sympathetic look.
“I’m not particularly sharp set, Miss Garden,” he said. “We had a good breakfast, your brother—your uncle, is it? How curious!—and I. But I’ve no doubt I still can peck a bit.”
“That’s a suitable thing to do when you’re coming into a Garden domain!” laughed Mary. “We have such a useful name! It makes itself into little mild jokes all the time.” She threw off her close straw hat and brushed up her damp hair, which its pressure had made into small rings of glossy brown on her forehead.