She knew that by some inward wilfulness she had kept her cycle as far as she could from that of her companion.
“It will be strange to be back at home,” Dan next said. “It is a pretty home, too, in its way—a big, old, really old, cottage, with little latticed windows with diamond-shaped panes. There is a porch with two seats in it, and that and all the cottage is covered with creepers—not Virginian—the tool house is covered with that—but rose, and honeysuckle, and blue clematis, and a grape-vine. The garden is pretty, too, quite a cottage garden, with vegetables and fruit trees and borders of flowers.”
“Is there anywhere to paint?” asked Phyllis.
“Surely Philip has told you of my gem of a studio in the garden?” asked the surprised Dan.
“Oh, I remember now,” said Phyllis. “You have leopard skins on the floor, and some old furniture that Philip said was quite beautiful.”
“I got it for a song at a sale at one of the big old-fashioned Dulwich houses. My sister Isabel corrects exercise-books there in the evenings. She brings them home from the James Allen School, you know. She can’t do them in the same room with Aunt Lizzie and my mother. Aunt Lizzie talks without stopping, and my mother chirps in now and then.”
Phyllis put a question now and then to keep Dan on this topic. She had a mortal dread that if he began to rave about the beauty and sweetness of Miss Le Breton, she should betray herself.
It chimed a quarter past one as the cyclists reached Blacklands Church.
“We shall be quite in time,” said Dan.
“Oh, yes, we shall be quite in time,” echoed Phyllis in a tired voice.