“Good-Friday on a positively summer day would be too much for my brain to take in,” said Evelyn Headfort.
“Yes,” her sister agreed. “But Easter and sunshine are not incongruous. Let us hope we shall not have winter back again; there is still a week to Easter Day, you know, Evey.”
“I don’t think it is likely to get cold again now; there are no weather prophecies of the kind,” said Mrs Headfort. “Still it is well to make hay while the sun shines. I think we shall be pretty straight by the end of next week. I mean to say, the rough of the work done, so that I shall not need to come back again till we come for good.”
“I think so,” Philippa agreed. “But you know tradespeople and workpeople are proverbially behind time in these cases.”
She glanced around her as she spoke. They were standing in what was in process of being converted into a drawing-room in the old house on Mr Headfort’s —shire property which was now to be Evelyn’s home.
It was a dear old place, and with great capabilities of better things; though hitherto it had been little more—of late years at least—than a large well-kept farm-house.
But it was not substantially out of repair, and it was very roomy. So no fresh building was called for, only the removal or alteration of partitions and doors and such, comparatively speaking, expeditious work, as well as painting, papering, and general embellishment to suit Mrs Marmaduke Headfort’s taste, and to be a fitting background to the well-chosen furniture of which a great part was the old squire’s gift. A “wedding present” he called it, though coming somewhat late in the day.
Altogether fortune was smiling on Duke and his wife. And Evelyn’s busy little brain meant to extract more smiles from the capricious lady before she had done with her. It had not been only and entirely for selfish reasons that she had dragged her sister from home to “rough it” for a fortnight at Palden Grange, declaring that she could not possibly “manage” without Philippa’s advice and practical help about everything.
“Especially as Duke, you know, mamma, will be out all day. He is infatuated about his new work and says he has such a lot to learn, and he doesn’t care a bit what our house is to look like. No, I must have Phil.”
And Phil she had, the girl herself neither urging nor objecting to the plan. Philippa was perplexed and unsettled in those days. She could not understand Bernard Gresham’s silence. For the weeks were passing, and the reasons for seeing and hearing nothing more of him, which for a time had satisfied her, were no longer in existence. Evelyn, too, was puzzled; half prepared to be angry with her hero, and at other times inclined to throw the blame on her sister’s “stand-off” manner.