Louie saw no reason why she should not say, in the simple French which may more or less be assumed to go with large houses and cars, that she preferred that the boy himself should not be told so; and then she went into the kitchen again to smile. She remembered Burnett Minor: "Voo affectay feele!" she murmured softly. Then she made tea.
"I suppose you're not quite settled yet?" she said, returning with the tray.
"Settled! Why, it will take us months!" Evie purred.
"Of course. It seems very odd to talk over the telephone, though, to a place you've never seen. Sugar? Is this place at all like what you imagined?"
Again came the ready-made answer: "Oh, it's really quite too delightful!" It was a pity, Louie thought, that Mrs. Jeffries had not had the advantage of a few minutes' talk with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith before coming to see her. The Lady-in-Charge at Rainham Parva might have warned her.
But Louie knew that already her very chairs and mats and brown-papered walls were silently whispering to Evie Jeffries. She might talk of Iddesleigh Gate, but she was thinking of nothing less than of Iddesleigh Gate. Perhaps she had been reassured in the matter of Jimmy's eyes, which were as blue as Roy's, but her own eyes were taking in everything for all that. Let them. Louie wondered whether, did she turn her back for a few minutes, her visitor would question the child.
"The Amaranth Room?" she presently interrupted Evie's flow to say. "Have you really a room called that? How lovely it sounds!"
"Nearly fifty feet long, my husband says; why, it has to have three large fireplaces, as well as the radiators, but of course there's steam-heat all through the house. It's delicious, not to walk into cold patches all of a sudden. And all the windows on one side are double, so that the place is perfectly quiet. You must come some time. Of course," she took herself up, "our other house was quite a poky place; my husband never really settled there; but at Iddesleigh Gate, he says, he can really stretch himself."
Louie meditated for a moment. Then: "What's really been the matter with him?" she asked. She knew that Evie would probably not believe she didn't know; for that reason it was better to ask.
But she got no information. It was overstrain, Evie replied lightly, and then on the top of that he'd slipped one night and caught his head on the corner of a fender. He'd slipped because he'd been really fagged out, what with starting the Consolidation and one thing and another. "But he looks all right now, don't you think?" Evie asked.