George's start, as he took his coffee from her, did not escape her.
"Miss Sewell gone? But why this suddenness?" he inquired. "I thought Miss
Letty was to be here to the end of the week."
Mrs. Watton raised her shoulders. "She sent a note in to me at half-past eight to say her mother wasn't well, and she was wanted at home. She just rushed in to say good-bye to me, chattered a great deal, kissed everybody a great deal—and I know no more. I hear she had breakfast and a fly, which is all I troubled myself about. I never interfere with the modern young woman."
Then she raised her eyeglass, and looked hard and curiously at Tressady. His face told her nothing, however, and as she was the least sympathetic of women, she soon forgot her own curiosity.
Evelyn Watton, a vision of fresh girlhood in her morning frock, glanced shyly at him once or twice as she gave him scones and mustard. She was passing through a moment of poetry and happy dreams. All human beings walked glorified in her eyes, especially if they were young. Letty was not wholly to her taste, and had never been a particular friend. But she thought ill of no one, and her little heart must needs flutter tenderly in the presence of anything that suggested love and marriage. It had delighted her to watch George and Letty together. Now, why had Letty rushed away like this? She thought with concern, thrilling all the time, that Sir George looked grave and depressed.
George, however, was not depressed—or thought he was not. He walked into the library after breakfast, whistling, and quoting to himself:
And there be they
Who kissed his wings which brought him yesterday,
And thank his wings to-day that he is flown.
He prided himself on his memory of some modern poets, and the lines pleased him particularly.
He had no sooner done quoting, however, than his mother peered into the room, claiming the business talk that had been promised. From that talk George emerged irritable and silent. His mother's extravagance was really preposterous!—not to be borne. For four years now he had been free from the constant daily friction of money troubles which had spoilt his youth and robbed him of all power of respecting his mother. And he had hugged his freedom. But all the time it seemed he had been hugging illusion, and the troubles had been merely piling up for his return! Her present claims—and he knew very well that they were not the whole—would exhaust all his available balance at his bankers'.
Lady Tressady, for her part, thought, with indignant despair, that he had not behaved at all as an only son should—especially an only son just returned to a widowed mother after four years' absence. How could anyone suppose that in four years there would be no debts—on such a pittance of an income? Some money, indeed, he had promised her; but not nearly enough, and not immediately. He "must look into things at home." Lady Tressady was enraged with herself and him that she had not succeeded better in making him understand how pressing, how urgent, matters were.