“As if he would be thinking of such tommy-rot as marriage now!” cries Chris, more struck, apparently, by the ill-timing of the overture than its indelicacy.
“Miss Brine was shocked,” says Phillida, thoughtfully. “She said that it was putting the cart before the horse, and that Féo ought to have waited for him to speak first.”
“But if he wouldn’t?” cries little Daphne, swinging Lavinia’s hand, which she has annexed, to and fro, and staring up with the puzzled violet of her round eyes.
They all laugh.
“That is unanswerable,” says Lavinia, blushing even before the children at this new instance of Féodorovna’s monstrous candour; adding, in a not particularly elate key, as her glance takes in a recherché object nearing their little group across the white grass of the still wintry glebe, “Why, here is Féo!”
“They told me your mother was out,” says the visitor, as if this were a sufficient explanation for her appearance.
The children greet her with the hospitable warmth which nature and training dictate towards any guest, qua guest, but without the exuberant, confident joy with which they always receive Lavinia. However, they repeat the tale of General Forestier Walker’s crime and fate, and add, as peculiarly interesting to their hearer, the name of the presiding judge.
Féodorovna listens with an absence of mind and eye which she does not attempt to disguise.
“I was coming on to you,” she says, addressing Lavinia, and turning away with an expression of boredom from her polite little hosts. “I should have asked you to give me luncheon, but since I find you here, it does as well.”
Neither in voice nor manner is there any trace of the resentment that Miss Carew is guiltily feeling. Féodorovna never resents. Too well with herself often to perceive a slight, and too self-centred to remember it, Lavinia realizes with relief that all recollection of the peril Miss Prince’s shoulders had run at Sir George’s all-but ejecting hands has slidden from that fair creature’s memory.