"Well, I was pleased all the same. He said he was never so surprised in his life as when he heard Theo had married; but now he had seen me, he didn't feel surprised any more."
"That was impertinence."
"Not a bit! I thought it was rather nice."
A trifling difference of opinion; but, in point of character, it served to set the two women miles apart.
Evelyn's remark scarcely needed a reply; and Honor fell into a thoughtful silence.
She had allowed herself the rare indulgence of a day "off duty." Instead of accompanying Evelyn to the picnic, she had enjoyed a scrambling excursion with Mrs Conolly—whose friendship was fast becoming a real possession—and her two big babies; exploring hillsides and ravines; hunting up the rarer wild flowers and ferns; and lunching off sandwiches on a granite boulder overhanging infinity. This was her idea of enjoying life in the Himalayas; but the June sun proved a little exhausting; and she was aware of an unusual weariness as she lay back in her canvas chair in the verandah of "The Deodars,"—a woodland cottage, owing its pretentious name to the magnificent cedars that stood sentinel on either side of it.
Her eyes turned for comfort and refreshment to the stainless wonder of the snows, that were already beginning to don their evening jewels—coral and amethyst, opal and pearl. The railed verandah, and its sweeping sprays of honeysuckle, were delicately etched upon a sky of warm amber, shading through gradations of nameless colour into blue, where cloud-films lay like fairy islands in an enchanted sea. Faint whiffs of rose and honeysuckle hovered in the still air, like spirits of the coming twilight, entangling sense and soul in a sweetness that entices rather than uplifts.
Evelyn Desmond, perched lightly on the railings, showed ethereal as a large white butterfly, in the daintiness of her summer finery against a background of glowing sky. She swung a lace parasol aimlessly to and fro, and her gaze was concentrated on the buckle of an irreproachable shoe.
Honor, withdrawing her eyes reluctantly from the brooding peace of mountain and sky, wondered a little at her pensiveness; wondered also where her thoughts—if mere flittings of the mind are entitled to be so called—had carried her.