She turned them over, and lighted with satisfaction upon one with a foreign postmark.
Her correspondence with François Fontenelle—a correspondence of fifteen years’ duration—had never ceased to be a pleasure to her.
She picked up his letter, and went through the inner hall into the garden, to the seat under the beech tree.
Several things on the first page made her laugh. François was evidently in a gay mood when he wrote. He had more work with portraits than he could get through. He described his sitters with the light raillery he managed so well, presenting them to his reader with a felicity of phrase, a touch as skilful and clever as she well knew the portraits themselves must possess.
It was better to be François Fontenelle’s friend than his enemy, Miss Page reflected, and smiled to remember the rash women who now crowded to his studio, anxious to be painted by the popular if distinguished artist.
She guessed how many of them winced in secret at the result, and marvelled that fashion, as well as religion, should exact its willing martyrs.
“I hear,” he said towards the end of the letter, “that I’m likely to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her as a school-girl—went to school with her, I think; and she has been asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow—an architect. No. You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years. He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the Correggio. You know the one I mean?” The letter ended with talk about pictures.
Anne read it to the last word, and then sat with it still unfolded in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech under which she sat.
Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.
Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting.