‘Oh, four o’clock. I don’t want to go far. There is a woman I rather wished to go and see. Dear Mary Restormel, Kingston, you have often heard me speak of her. They have been friends of the family’s for I couldn’t say how long.’
‘Shall I come with you?’ asked Kingston, not fancying the back seat of the victoria, and hoping to be excused.
‘Oh no, dear. You had better sit in the garden and make yourself comfortable. We shall not be away long. Restormel is only about two miles off across the valley. And we’ll take the new horse too. So I expect we shall be home again in next to no time.’
‘What does one talk to Mrs. Restormel about?’ asked Isabel.
‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ replied Gundred, not admitting, even to herself, that her motive in taking Isabel was to prevent her from having Kingston to herself that afternoon. ‘I really want to see her. She is expecting a child in about a month, dear Mary Restormel. Such a mercy if it is a son—not that it will make any difference, I am afraid, for the place will certainly have to be sold as soon as poor Hugh Restormel dies. Such a cruel pity—the sweetest little old place, Isabel. But the Restormels are poorer than Church mice nowadays, and positively cannot keep it going for another generation. You will simply love it, Isabel; you will be able to wander in the garden and get lost.’
Expressing her joy at the prospect, Isabel made her escape to get ready.
Kingston and Gundred were left together.
‘You are quite sure you will not be lonely, Kingston,’ said Gundred, after a pause. She spoke with a tinge of remorse in her voice, reproaching herself with painful conscientiousness for her wish to deprive him of amusing company.
‘Oh no,’ he answered, not discerning her veiled apology, nor caring to. ‘I shall get along quite happily.’ He no longer answered her as he might have done in his first innocent friendliness, before Isabel had been revealed to him.
Gundred noticed the difference, with a subtlety for which he would not have given her credit.