The whole day after Grace was silent and thoughtful. Mrs. Hartley noticed she looked in an abstracted manner out of the window, and that occasionally she fixed her eyes on her with a sort of questioning and anxious expression.
Towards evening Mrs. Hartley determined to break the ice. “That girl has something on her mind,” she considered as she entered the drawing-room five minutes before dinner, “I must find out what it is,” and she proved herself as good as her words.
They had dined, dessert was on the table, Grace was toying with some fruit on her plate, Mrs. Hartley had swallowed two of the three glasses of port her doctor assured her she ought to take with as “much regularity as if it were medicine.”
At this precise stage of the proceedings she had made up her mind to speak, and with Mrs. Hartley, to make up her mind was to do.
“Grace,” she began, “there is something troubling you.”
“Yes, Mrs. Hartley, I have a very great trouble,” answered Grace calmly.
In an access of excitement Mrs. Hartley poured out and swallowed that third glass of port.
“Let us go into the other room, where we can talk comfortably, my dear,” she said, rising; and Grace, nothing loth, left her untouched fruit, walked across the hall into the snug little drawing-room she had learned to love so much, opening on one side to a conservatory, and on the other to a lawn kept smooth and soft as velvet.
After all, spite of its shrubs, its trees, its long sea frontage, and its acres of garden ground, there was room for much improvement at Bayview.
“If ever I return to Ireland,” Grace had said to herself many and many a time, “I will have that grass kept like these English lawns.”