Already she was assuming her ancient intimacy with the ways of the house, and the servant made way for her as she passed him, traversing the hall with a mournful swagger.
Lady Henrietta was knitting hard.
She sat in a deep sofa by the fire, turned so that it faced the hangings that screened off the outer hall. The library was so big that it seemed to reach at either end into darkness, and the lamps made little islands of brilliance here and there in the prevailing gloom. Behind, with the books, there was another fireplace, a red and glimmering hearth where two or three dogs lay, warm and sleepy, dreaming of winter tramps and a man calling them to heel. One, a terrier with a bitten ear, had started half-awake on a run down the room, but she could not settle on the other rug, and came back restlessly to her post on the shabbier tiger-skin.
Barnaby's mother had a thin, hard, eager face, with a flick of colour high on her cheek-bones. Not an unkind woman, but one possessed by some passion that had tempered a frivolous, careless nature to a mood of iron. Her rings glittered as she knitted, and the wires clicked faster and faster, as if it were impossible that her fingers could be for a minute still. She was knitting a man's grey-green shooting stocking.
Occasionally her eyes, with a strange spark in them, lit on a girl sitting opposite, gazing into the fire. The girl was young and quiet; her head shone dark in the ring of light; her cheek was pale, but her short upper lip showed courage. Lady Henrietta watched her with a fierce joy that was not yet liking.
"You're not at all what I expected," she said abruptly. "I was afraid of what I would see, and I didn't dare to look at you when you arrived last night;—but twenty times I turned the handle of your bedroom door. At last, I poked my head in when you were asleep, just to know the worst.—I nearly dropped the candle when I saw your little head on the pillow."
"What did you expect?" the girl said faintly.
"A great, coarse, fine woman, snoring," said Lady Henrietta.
All at once she bent forward, putting her knitting into the girl's hands. There was significance in the gesture.
"Pick up that stitch for me," she said. "He never liked ladders in his stockings."