Presently he had a brilliant idea. Miss Georges was the person to cheer her, to tempt her out of her mother's sick-room. So the next time he was going to Red Riff to inspect some repairs in the roof—the next time was the same afternoon—he expounded this view at considerable length to Annette, whom he found thinning the annuals in a lilac pinafore and sunbonnet in the walled garden.
She sat down on the circular bench round the apple tree while he talked, and as he sat by her it seemed to him, not for the first time, that in some mysterious way it was a very particular occasion. There was a delightful tremor in the air. It suggested the remark which he at once made that it was a remarkably fine afternoon. Annette agreed, rather too fine for thinning annuals, though just the weather for her aunts to drive over to Noyes to call on Mr. Stirling Now that Roger came to look at Annette he perceived that she herself was part of the delicious trouble in the air. It lurked in her hair, and the pure oval of her cheek, and her eyes—most of all in her eyes. He was so taken aback by this discovery that he could only stare at the sky. And yet if the silly man had been able to put two and two together, if he had known as much about human nature as he did about reaping-machines, he would not have been in the dark as to why he was sitting under the apple tree at this moment, why he had ordered those new riding-breeches, why he had them on at this instant, why he had begun to dislike Mr. Black, and why he had been so expeditious in retiling the laiterie after the tree fell on it. If he had had a grain of self-knowledge, he would have realized that there must indeed be a grave reason for these prompt repairs which the Miss Nevills had taken as a matter of course.
For in the ordinary course of things tiles could hardly be wrested out of Roger, and drainpipes and sections of lead guttering were as his life-blood, never to be parted with except as a last resort after a desperate struggle. The estate was understaffed, underfinanced, and the repairs were always in arrear. Even the estate bricklayer, ruthlessly torn from a neighbouring farm to spread himself on the Miss Nevills' roof, opined to his nephew with the hod, that "Mr. Roger must be uncommon sweet on Miss Georges to be in such a mortial hurry with them tiles."
Annette's voice recalled Roger from the contemplation of the heavens.
"I will go down to-day, after tea," she was saying, "and I will persuade Janey to come and sit in the hay-field. It is such a pretty thing a hay-field. I've never seen hay in—in what do you call it?"
"In cock."
"Yes. Such a funny word! I've never seen hay in cock before."
Roger smiled indulgently. Annette's gross ignorance of country-life did not pain him. It seemed as much part of her as a certain little curl on the white nape of her neck.
Down the lane a child's voice came singing—