"Oh! There is a tea-cake," said Di, discovering another dish behind the kettle. "Why did not I see it before?"
"It is not too late, I hope," said John, anxiously. The stupidity of James in putting a tea-cake (which might have been preferred to bread and butter) out of sight behind an opaque kettle, caused him profound annoyance.
But Di could not take a personal interest in the tea-cake. She looked back at the lilies.
"Don't you long to be in the country?" she said. "I find myself dreaming about green fields and flowers gratis. I have not seen a country lane since Easter, and then it rained all the time. It is three years since I have found a hedge-sparrow's nest with eggs in it. Don't you long to get away?"
"I long to get back to Overleigh," said John. "I went there for a few days in the spring on my return from Russia. The place was looking lovely; but," he added, as if it were a matter of course, "naturally Overleigh always looks beautiful to me."
Di did not answer.
"You know the wood below the house," he went on. "When I saw it last all the rhododendrons were out."
"I have never seen Overleigh," said Di, looking at the lilies again, and trying to speak unconcernedly. She knew Lord Hemsworth's tiresome old Border castle. She had visited at many historic houses. She and Mrs. Courtenay were going to some shortly. But her own family place, the one house of all others in the whole world which she would have cared to see, she had never seen. She had often heard about it from acquaintances, had looked wistfully at drawings of it in illustrated magazines, had questioned Mrs. Courtenay and Archie about it, had wandered in imagination in its long gallery, and down the lichened steps from the postern in the wall, that every artist vignetted, to the stone-flagged Italian gardens below. But with her bodily eyes she had never beheld it, and the longing returned at intervals. It had returned now.
"Will you come and see it?" said John, looking away from her. It seemed to him that he was playing a game in which he had staked heavily, against some one who had staked nothing, who was not even conscious of playing, and might inadvertently knock over the board at any moment. He felt as if he had noiselessly pushed forward his piece, and as if everything depended on the withdrawal of his hand from it unobserved.
"I have wished to see Overleigh from a child," said Di, flushing a little. "Think what you feel about it, and my father, and our grandfather. Well—I am a Tempest too."