"I can't make out that woman," remarked Greenleaf's new acquaintance, the æsthetic man; "she's usually by ways of being prudish, and has a way of shutting up poor Chatty when he gets into this strain. Only yesterday, she told him his song was beastly, and it wasn't half as bad as this one. I expect she's doing it from cussedness, because her husband was bored at her being too particular yesterday; because, of course, he'll be bored by her not being particular enough to-day."
Greenleaf walked up to a picture, and thence slunk off to the door. As he was leaving the room, he looked back at the former Miss Flodden: she was still standing near the piano, listening composedly, but he thought that her thin face bore an expression of defiance.
He was so excited that he opened his room door too quickly to give effect to a practical joke, consisting of a can of water balancing on its angle as it stood ajar, and intended to tumble on his head while he was passing in; a delicate jest which the girl who had sat next to him—she of the punt, diamond garter and coach adventures—occasionally practised on the new inmates of what she technically called "houses."
IX.
The next morning, after surveying the house with his host, and making elaborate plans for its alteration with his hostess, Greenleaf was going for a stroll outside the grounds, when he suddenly heard his name called by the voice of her who had once been Val Flodden, but of whom he already thought only as Mrs. Hermann Struwë. She arose from under a big cedar, among whose sweeping branches she had been seated reading.
"Are you going for a walk?" she asked, coming towards him in her white frock, incredibly white against the green lawn, and trailing her also incredibly white parasol after her.
"Is it true that you go back to town this afternoon?"
"Yes," answered Greenleaf, laconically.
"Then," she said, "I will come with you a little way."
They walked silently through a little wood of beeches, and out into the meadows by the river. Greenleaf found it too difficult to say anything, and, after all, why say anything to her?