Lester was left to his work. But his mood had been diverted, and he presently found that he was wasting time. He walked to the window, and stood there gazing at the bright flower-beds in the formal garden, the fountain plashing in its center, the low hills and woods that closed the horizon, the villages with their church-towers, piercing the shelter of the woods. May had drawn over the whole her first veils of green. The English perfection, the English mellowness, was everywhere; the spring breathings in the air came scented with the young leaf of trees that had been planted before Blenheim was fought.
Suddenly across the farther end of the garden passed a girlish figure in white. Lester's pulses ran. It was Marcia. He saw her but seldom, and that generally at a distance. But sometimes she would come, in her pretty, friendly way, to chat to him about his work, and turn over his manuscripts.
"She has the same feeling about me that nice women have about their dogs and cats. They are conscious of them, sorry for them; they don't like them to feel themselves neglected. So she comes to see me every now and then—lest I should think myself forgotten. Her conscience pricks her for people less prosperous than herself. I see it quite plainly. But she would be angry if I were to tell her so!"
CHAPTER VII
It was a breezy June afternoon, with the young summer at its freshest and lustiest.
Lord and Lady William Newbury were strolling in the garden at Hoddon Grey. The long low line of the house rose behind them—an attractive house and an old one, but with no architectural features to speak of, except a high-pitched mossy roof, a picturesque series of dormer-windows, and a high gable and small lantern cupola at the farther end which marked the private chapel. The house was evidently roomy, but built for comfort, not display; the garden with its spreading slopes and knolls was simple and old-fashioned, in keeping thereby with the general aspect of the two people who were walking up and down the front lawn together.
Lord William Newbury was a man of sixty-five, tall and slenderly built. His pale hazel eyes, dreamily kind, were the prominent feature of his face; he had very thin flat cheeks, and his white hair—he was walking bareheaded—was blown back from a brow which, like the delicate mouth, was still young, almost boyish. Sweetness and a rather weak refinement—a stranger would probably have summed up his first impressions of Lord William, drawn from his bodily presence, in some such words. But the stranger who did so would have been singularly wide of the mark. His wife beside him looked even frailer and slighter than he. A small and mouse-like woman, dressed in gray clothes of the simplest and plainest make, and wearing a shady garden hat; her keen black eyes in her shriveled face gave that clear promise of strong character in which her husband's aspect, at first sight, was lacking. But Lady William knew her place. She was the most submissive and the most docile of wives; and on no other terms would life have been either possible or happy in her husband's company.
They were discussing, with some eagerness, the approaching arrival of their week-end guests—Lady Coryston and Marcia, the new dean of a neighboring cathedral, an ex-Cabinet Minister and an Oxford professor. But the talk, however it circled, had a way of returning to Marcia. It was evident that she held the field.
"It is so strange that I have scarcely seen her!" Lady William was saying in a tone which was not without its note of complaint. "I hope dear Edward has not been too hasty in his choice. As for you, William, I don't believe you would know her again, if you were to see her without her mother."