As it was, her eyes and mouth wavered a little under Winnington's look.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "I shall soon be rested."
They sat down. Delia was conscious—unwillingly conscious, of a nervous agitation she did her best to check. For Winnington also it was clearly an awkward moment. He began at once to talk of his old recollections of her parents, of her mother's beauty, of her father's reputation as the most dashing soldier on the North-West frontier, in the days when they first met in India.
"But his health was even then very poor. I suppose it was that made him leave the army?"
"Yes—and then Parliament," said Delia. "He was ordered a warm climate for the winter. But he could never have lived without working. His Governorship just suited him."
She spoke with charming softness, beguiled from her insensibly by Winnington's own manner. At the back of Winnington's mind, as they talked, ran perpetual ejaculations—ejaculations of the natural man in the presence of so much beauty. But his conversation with her flowed the while with an even gentleness which never for a moment affected intimacy, and was touched here and there with a note of deference, even of ceremony, which disarmed his companion.
"I never came across your father down here—oddly enough," he said presently. "He had left Sandhurst before I went to Eton; and then there was Oxford, and then the bar. My little place belonged then to a cousin, and I had hardly ever seen it. But of course I knew, your grandmother—everybody did. She was a great centre—a great figure. She has left her mark here. Don't you find it so?"
"Yes. Everybody seems to remember her."
But, in a moment, the girl before him had changed and stiffened. It seemed to Winnington, as to Mrs. France, that she pulled herself up, reacting against something that threatened her. The expression in her eyes put something between them. "Perhaps you know"—she said—"that my grandmother didn't always get on with my mother?"
He wondered why she had reminded him of that old family jar, which gossip had spread abroad. Did it really rankle in her mind? Odd, that it should!