“He knows he can come whenever he likes,” replied her mother. “Yes, they were very kind; but sometimes, Louise, I wonder if that visit to London was not a mistake. It only seemed to clench matters.”
“No,” said Louise, “nothing would have kept back Winifred, mother. Do try to believe that.”
Easter, though it fell early that year, was wonderfully bright and mild. The morning which saw Miss Norreys and Winifred off to the country was, as to weather, a real red-letter day, and Hertha’s spirits, as she drove to the station where she and her “devoted friend” were to meet, rose higher and higher.
Not that she was anticipating any special enjoyments in her visit. More than once she had asked herself if she were not acting foolishly in bestowing a whole week of her rare holidays upon perfect strangers—and strangers whom she had no particularly strong reasons for expecting to find sympathetic and congenial.
“I really don’t know why I accepted,” she thought.
But this morning she felt a sort of reward—if reward she deserved, as she said to herself—in the beautiful promises of spring delights that met her even in the dingy streets through which a hansom rapidly carried her.
“What will it not be in the country?” was almost her first greeting to Winifred, when that young lady appeared, more punctually than was her habit, in honour of her expected guest. “If this weather lasts it will be perfectly—heavenly. Primroses and gorse always picture to me the streets of gold far more exquisitely than the thought of the hard, cold metal.”
And her eyes sparkled, and her beautiful expressive face flushed with the quick instinctive response to nature which was one of her characteristics.
Winifred looked at her in some surprise. This phase of Miss Norreys’s character was new to her, but as it was Miss Norreys and no one else, the girl’s instinct was to admire and not criticise.
“You make me afraid to say what I have been wishing all the morning,” she said with a little smile.