Lady Valence declared herself in despair, but as nobody could remember the weather ever being anything but highly detestable the day of her garden-party, it is to be hoped that she in reality took it more philosophically than she allowed, Despard strode about feeling very cold, and wondering why he had come, and why, having come, he stayed. There was a long row of conservatories and ferneries, and glass-houses of every degree of temperature not far from the lawn, where at one end the band was playing, and at the other some deluded beings were eating ices. Despard shivered; the whole was too ghastly. A door in the centre house stood invitingly open, and he turned in. Voices near at hand, female voices, warned him off at one side, for he was not feeling amiable, and he hastened in the opposite direction. By degrees the pleasant warmth, the extreme beauty of the plants and flowers amidst which he found himself, the solitariness, too, soothed and subdued his irritation.
“If I could smoke,” he began to say to himself, when, looking round with a half-formed idea of so doing, he caught sight amidst the ferns of feminine drapery. Some one was there before him—but a very quiet, mouse-like somebody. A somebody who was standing there motionless, gazing at the tall tropical plants, enjoying, apparently, the warmth and the quiet like himself.
“That girl in black, that sphinx of a girl again—by Jove!” murmured Despard under his breath, and as he did so, she turned and saw him.
Her first glance was of annoyance; he saw her clearly from where he stood, there was no mistaking the fact. But, so quickly, that it was difficult to believe it had been there, the expression of vexation passed. The sharply contracted brows smoothed; the graceful head bent slightly forward; the lips parted.
“How do you do, Mr Norreys?” she said. “We are always running against each other unexpectedly, are we not?”
Her tone was perfectly natural, her manner expressed simple pleasure and gratification. She was again the third, the rarest of her three selves—the personality which Despard, in his heart of hearts, believed to be herself.
He smiled—a slightly amused, almost a slightly condescending smile, but a very pleasant one all the same. He could afford to be pleasant now. Poor silly little girl—she had given in with a good grace, a truce to her nonsense of regal airs and dignity; a truce, too, to the timid self-consciousness of her first introduction.
“She understands better now, I see,” he thought. “Understands that a little country girl is but—ah, well—but a little country girl. Still, I must allow—” and he hesitated as his glance fell on her; it was the first time he had seen her by daylight, and the words he had mentally used did not quite “fit”—“I must allow that she has brains, and some character of her own.”
“I can imagine its seeming so to you,” he said aloud. “You have, I think you told me, lived always in the country. Of course, in the country one’s acquaintances stand out distinctly, and one remembers every day whom one has and has not seen. In town it is quite different. I find myself constantly forgetting people, and doing all sorts of stupid things, imagining I have seen some one last week when it was six months ago, and so on. But people are really very good-natured.”
She listened attentively.