The letter to Mrs Lyle was written and sent. It reached her in her new Indian quarters about ten days before Mrs Mildmay started on her return home.
It was May; the charming capricious month we dream of all the year round, always believing—thanks to poets and childish remembrances rose-coloured by the lapse of time—that if the weather is cold and gray and generally disappointing this year, it is quite an exception and never has been so before: it was May before the day came on which Lady Myrtle Goodacre's landau set off in state for Thetford railway station, with Jacinth, Frances, and Eugene already occupying it, and a vacant seat for Miss Alison Mildmay whom they were to call for on the way.
Frances and even Eugene were almost speechless with excitement: Jacinth, though wound up to a tremendous pitch, was too proud and too self-contained by habit to show what she was feeling.
'Lady Myrtle hopes you will come back with us, Aunt Alison,' she said quietly, 'at least to spend the rest of the day, as you wouldn't consent to come to stay for two or three.'
Miss Mildmay, before replying, glanced at her niece with a curious sort of admiration, not altogether free from disappointment.
'Jacinth certainly is extraordinarily self-controlled,' she thought. Very self-controlled, like very reserved people do not always entirely appreciate their own characteristics in another! But aloud she replied much in the same matter-of-fact tone.
'It is very good of her, but I would rather find my own way home from the station. I will come out to Robin Redbreast to-morrow or the day after to have a talk with your mother. She will have more than enough to occupy her to-day.'
Jacinth secretly commended her aunt's good sense, but the younger ones seemed a little sorry. They wanted everybody to be as happy as themselves.
'It isn't that you don't think there'd be room enough in the carriage, Aunt Alison, is it?' said Frances, anxiously. 'For the closed wagonette is coming too for mamma's maid and the luggage, and I wouldn't mind the least bit getting into it.'