So he lifted them off the mantel and they hastily departed, each administering correction with her riding crop as she dodged past him and escaped.
“If your guests want horses you know where to find 297 them!” called back his sister from the porch. And presently she and his mother, securely mounted, went cantering away across country, where grass and fern and leaf and blossom were glistening in the rising breeze, weighted down with diamond drops of rain.
Westmore walked leisurely toward his quarters, to freshen up and don knickers. Garret followed him into the west wing, whistling contentedly under his breath, inspecting each remembered object with great content as he passed, nodding smilingly to the servants he encountered, lingering on the landing to acknowledge the civilities of the ancient family cat, who recognised him with effusion but coyly fled the advances of Westmore, ignoring all former and repeated introductions.
Their rooms adjoined and they conversed through the doorway while engaged in ablutions.
Presently, from behind his sheer sash-curtains, Westmore caught sight of Thessalie on the west terrace below. She wore a shell-pink frock and a most distractingly pretty hat; and he hurried his dressing as much as he could without awaking Garret’s suspicions.
A few minutes later, radiant in white flannels, he appeared on the terrace, breathing rather fast but wreathed in persuasive smiles.
“I know this place; I’ll take you for a walk where you won’t get your shoes wet. Shall I?” he suggested, with all his guile and cunning quite plain to Thessalie, and his purpose perfectly transparent to her smiling eyes.
But she consented prettily, and went with him without demurring, picking her way over the stepping-stone walk with downcast gaze and the trace of a smile on her lips—a smile as delicately indefinable as the fancy which moved her to accept this young man’s headlong advances—which had recognized them and accepted 298 them from the first. But why, she did not even yet understand.
“Agreeable weather, isn’t it?” said Westmore, fatuously revealing his present paucity of ideas apart from those which concerned the wooing of her. And he was an intelligent young man at that, and a sculptor of attainment, too. But now, in his infatuated head, there remained room only for one thought, the thought of this girl who walked so demurely and daintily beside him over the flat, grass-set stepping stones toward the three white pines on the little hill.
For it had been something or other at first sight with Westmore—love, perhaps—anyway that is what he called the mental chaos which now disorganised him. And it was certain that something happened to him the first time he laid eyes on Thessalie Dunois. He knew it, and she could not avoid seeing it, so entirely naïve his behaviour, so utterly guileless his manœuvres, so direct, unfeigned and childish his methods of approach.