Buntingford entered, flushed with his walk, and carrying a bunch of blue-bells which he presented to Lady Georgina.
"I gathered them in Cricket Wood. The whole wood is a sea of blue. You and Cynthia must really go and see them."
He settled himself in a chair, and plunged into tea and small talk as though to the manner born. But all the time Cynthia, while approving his naval uniform, and his general picturesqueness, was secretly wondering what he had come about. For although he was enjoying a well-earned leave, the first for two years, and had every right to idle, the ordinary afternoon call of country life, rarely, as she knew, came into the scheme of his day. The weather was beautiful and she had made sure that he would be golfing on a well-known links some three miles off.
Presently the small talk flagged, and Buntingford began to fidget. Slowly Lady Georgina rose from her seat, and again extinguished the flame under the silver kettle. Would she go, or would she not go? Cynthia dropped some stitches in the tension of the moment. Then Buntingford got up to open the door for Georgina, who, without deigning to make any conventional excuse for her departure, nevertheless departed.
Buntingford returned to his seat, picked up Cynthia's ball of wool, and sat holding it, his eyes on the down-dropped head of his cousin, and on the beautiful hands holding the knitting-needles. Yes, she was still very good-looking, and had been sensible enough not to spoil herself by paint and powder, unlike that silly child, Helena, who was yet so much younger—twenty-two years younger, almost. It seemed incredible. But he could reckon Cynthia's age to a day; for they had known each other very well as children, and he had often given her a birthday present, till the moment when, in her third season, Cynthia had peremptorily put an end to the custom. Then he had gone abroad, and there had been a wide gap of years when they had never seen each other at all. And now, it was true, she did often bore him, intellectually. But at this moment, he was not bored—quite the contrary. The sunny cottage room, with its flowers and books and needlework, and a charming woman as its centre, evidently very glad to see him, and ready to welcome any confidences he might give her, produced a sudden sharp effect upon him. That hunger for something denied him—the "It" which he was always holding at bay—sprang upon him, and shook his self-control.
"We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Cynthia?" he said, smiling, and holding out her ball of wool.
Cynthia hardly concealed her start of pleasure. She looked up, shaking her hair from her white brow and temples with a graceful gesture, half responsive, half melancholy.
"So long!" she said—"it doesn't bear thinking of."
"Not at all. You haven't aged a bit. I want you to help me in something, Cynthia. You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the old days?"
They both laughed. Cynthia remembered very well. That scrape, for instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village school-master—a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford grand-père. Or that much worse scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:—an angry grandfather breathing fire and slaughter. Certainly in those days Philip had been unusually—remarkably susceptible. Cynthia remembered him as always in or out of a love-affair, while she to whom he never made love was alternately champion and mentor. In those days, he had no expectation of the estates or the title. He was plain Philip Bliss, with an artistic and literary turn, great personal charm, and a temperament that invited catastrophes. That was before he went to Paris and Rome for serious work at painting. Seven years he had been away from England, and she had never seen him. He had announced his marriage to her in a short note containing hardly any particulars—except that his wife was a student like himself, and that he intended to live abroad and work. Some four years later, the Times contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife's death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two—pessimist and dilettante—who had returned. His lameness he ascribed to an accident in the Alps, but would never say anything more about it; and his friends presently learned to avoid the subject, and to forget the slight signs of something unexplained which had made them curious at first.