Eliot had moved all the cushions down under the tree, scowling as he did it, for he knew that when his mother was really cool he would have to get up and move them back again.
With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled in her lair, under her tree.
Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne's father came towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.
Handsome even after fifteen years of India. Handsomer than when he was young. More distinguished. Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze. She liked his lean, eager, deerhound's face, ready to start off, sniffing the trail. A little strained, leashed now, John's eagerness. But that was how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if they could do things together.
She had tried to find his youth in Anne's face; but Anne's blackness and whiteness were her mother's; her little nose was still soft and vague; you couldn't tell what she would be like in five years' time. Still, there was something; the same strange quality; the same forward-springing grace.
Before he reached her, Adeline was smiling again. A smile of the delicate, instinctive mouth, of the blue eyes shining between curled lids, under dark eyebrows; of the innocent white nose; of the whole soft, milk-white face. Even her sleek, dark hair smiled, shining. She was conscious of her power to make him come to her, to make herself felt through everything, even through his bereavement.
The subtle Eliot, looking over the terrace wall, observed her and thought, "The mater's jolly pleased with herself. I wonder why."
It struck Eliot also that a Commissioner of Ambala and a Member of the Legislative Council and a widower ought not to look like Mr. Severn. He was too lively, too adventurous.
He turned again to the enthralling page. "The student should lay open the theoracic cavity of the rabbit and dissect away the thymous gland and other tissues which hide the origin of the great vessels; so as to display the heart…"
Yearp, the vet, would show him how to do that.