CHAPTER VI
"Some people," said Mousie Cavendish, "appear to have come into a fortune."
She touched Esmé Carteret's sable coat, stroking the soft fur, her small greenish eyes looking up wickedly.
"Friends ... are nice things," said Mousie, softly. "Hey, my pretty Esmé."
Esmé flushed. Five minutes before she had grumbled at her poverty, now she came down in her splendid wrap waiting for the motor.
Money had never seemed to go so fast. The half-year's allowance from Denise had been spent in a day. More new frocks, new habits had seemed necessary. A restlessness haunted Esmé; she was not satisfied with anything, she was nervous, lacked appetite, had grown thin.
She was doing the last of the hunting season at Coombe Regis now, an old Elizabethan house taken by the Holbrooks.
Their only difficulty, as Mousie said sweetly, is "that they cannot remake the bricks with gold dust, it's so ordinary to have one's house made of clay and straw and water, otherwise bricks."
There were horses in the stables, sleek, shining hunters, belonging to friends who came to stay. Esmé hired from a local stable. She rode hard and straight, but came in tired after her day; her old perfect health had deserted her.
"There," said Mousie, looking out onto the chill March day, "is Luke, our host, seeking for something he may spend money on. He wants to be a peer next birthday, and his hopes are high."