But a month ago had come turmoil. Roger Orme announced his return. Fortune-making in America had tired him. He was coming home to settle down for good in Dunsfield, in the house of his fathers. This was Duns Lodge, whose forty acres marched with the two hundred acres of Duns Hall. The two places were known in the district as "The Lodge" and "The Hall." About a century since, a younger son of The Hall had married a daughter of The Lodge, whence the remote tie of consanguinity between Winifred Goode and Roger Orme. The Lodge had been let on lease for many years, but now the lease had fallen in and the tenants gone. Roger had arrived in England yesterday. A telegram had bidden her expect him that afternoon. She sat in the garden expecting him, and stared wistfully at the old grey house, a curious fear in her eyes.
Perhaps, if freakish chance had not brought Mrs. Donovan to Dunsfield on a visit to the Rector, a day or two after Roger's letter, fear—foolish, shameful, sickening fear—might not have had so dominant a place in her anticipation of his homecoming. Mrs. Donovan was a contemporary, a Dunsfield girl, who had married at nineteen and gone out with her husband to India. Winifred Goode remembered a gipsy beauty riotous in the bloom of youth. In the Rector's drawing-room she met a grey-haired, yellow-skinned, shrivelled caricature, and she looked in the woman's face as in a mirror of awful truth in which she herself was reflected. From that moment she had known no peace. Gone was her placid acceptance of the footprints of the years, gone her old-maidish pride in dainty, old-maidish dress. She had mixed little with the modern world, and held to old-fashioned prejudices which prescribed the outward demeanour appropriate to each decade. One of her earliest memories was a homely saying of her father's—which had puzzled her childish mind considerably—as to the absurdity of sheep being dressed lamb fashion. Later she understood and cordially agreed with the dictum. The Countess of Ingleswood, the personage of those latitudes, at the age of fifty showed the fluffy golden hair and peach-bloom cheeks and supple figure of twenty; she wore bright colours and dashing hats, and danced and flirted and kept a tame-cattery of adoring young men. Winifred visited with Lady Ingleswood because she believed that, in these democratic days, it was the duty of county families to outmatch the proletariat in solidarity; but, with every protest of her gentlewoman's soul, she disapproved of Lady Ingleswood. Yet now, to her appalling dismay, she saw that, with the aid of paint, powder, and peroxide, Lady Ingleswood had managed to keep young. For thirty years, to Winifred's certain knowledge, she had not altered. The blasting hand that had swept over Madge Donovan's face had passed her by.
Winifred envied the woman's power of attraction. She read, with a curious interest, hitherto disregarded advertisements. They were so alluring, they seemed so convincing. Such a cosmetic used by queens of song and beauty restored the roses of girlhood; under such a treatment, wrinkles disappeared within a week—there were the photographs to prove it. All over London bubbled fountains of youth, at a mere guinea or so a dip. She sent for a little battery of washes and powders, and, when it arrived, she locked herself in her bedroom. But the sight of the first unaccustomed—and unskilfully applied—dab of rouge on her cheek terrified her. She realised what she was doing. No! Ten thousand times no! Her old-maidishness, her puritanism revolted. She flew to her hand-basin and vigorously washed the offending bloom away with soap and water. She would appear before the man she loved just as she was—if need be, in the withered truth of a Madge Donovan.... And, after all, had her beauty faded so utterly? Her glass said "No." But her glass mocked her, for how could she conjure up the young face of twenty which Roger Orme carried in his mind, and compare it with the present image?
She sat in the garden, this blazing July afternoon, waiting for him, her heart beating with the love of years ago, and the shrinking fear in her eyes. Presently she heard the sound of wheels, and she saw the open fly of "The Red Lion"—Dunsfield's chief hotel—crawling up the drive, and in it was a man wearing a straw hat. She fluttered a timid handkerchief, but the man, not looking in her direction, did not respond. She crossed the lawn to the terrace, feeling hurt, and entered the drawing-room by the open French window and stood there, her back to the light. Soon he was announced. She went forward to meet him.
"My dear Roger, welcome home."
He laughed and shook her hand in a hearty grip.
"It's you, Winifred. How good! Are you glad to see me back?"
"Very glad."
"And I."
"Do you find things changed?"