The girl’s quiet ardour, her simplicity and candour, attracted and interested him. Always he had seemed to be aware, in her, of hidden forces—of something fresh and charmingly impetuous held in leash—of controlled impulses, restless, uneasy, bitted, curbed, and reined in.
Pride, perhaps, a natural reticence in the opposite sex—perhaps the habit of control in a girl whose childhood had had no outlet—some of these, he concluded, accounted for her subdued air, her restraint from demonstration. Save for the impulsive little hand on his arm at times, the slightest quiver of lip and voice, there was no sign of the high-strung, fresh young force that he vaguely divined within her.
“Dulcie,” he said, “how much do you know about the romance of your mother?”
She lifted her grey eyes to his:
“What romance?”
“Why, her marriage.”
“Was that a romance?”
“I gather, from your father, that your mother was very much above him in station.”
“Yes. He was a gamekeeper for my grandfather.”