He enjoyed her surprise.
'Well? Do you remember admiring it at the cottage? I'm up to the neck in work. I never go there. I thought you and Hester might as well take care of it for a bit.'
Nelly approached it. It was one of the Turner water-colours which glorified the cottage; the most adorable, she thought, of all of them. It shewed a sea of downs, their grassy backs flowing away wave after wave, down to the real sea in the gleaming distance. Between the downs ran a long valley floor—cottages on it, woods and houses, farms and churches, strung on a silver river; under the mingled cloud and sunshine of an April day. It breathed the very soul of England,—of this sacred long-descended land of ours. Sarratt, who had stood beside her when she had first looked at it, had understood it so at once.
'Jolly well worth fighting for—this country! isn't it?' he had said to Farrell over her head, and once or twice afterwards he had spoken to her of the drawing with delight. 'I shall think of it—over there. It'll do one good.'
As she paused before it now, a sob rose in her throat. But she controlled herself quickly. Then something beyond the easel caught her eye—a mass of flowers, freesias, narcissus, tulips, tumbled on a table; then a pile of new books; and finally, a surprising piece of furniture.
'What have you been doing now?' she asked him, wondering, and, as Hester thought, shrinking back a little.
'It's from Cicely'—he said apologetically. 'She made me bring it. She declared she'd sampled the sofa here,—' he pointed to an ancient one in a corner—'and it would disgrace a dug-out. It's her affair—don't blame me!'
Nelly looked bewildered.
'But I'm not ill now. I'm getting well.'
'If you only knew what a ghost you look still,' he said vehemently, 'you'd let Cicely have her little plot. This used to stand in my mother's sitting-room. It was bought for her. Cicely had it put to rights.'