Easter came late this year, and April, the sunny, the showery, the capricious, was flinging her restless lights and shadows over the meadows and copses as he drove from the station. He had to pass Fernhurst on his way to Redwold Towers, and it was yet early in the afternoon as he drove past the quaint little cottage post-office in the dip of the hill, the tiny graveyard on the higher ground, the church and parsonage. It was early enough for afternoon-tea, and he had no need to hurry to Redwold. His sister had sent a groom with a dogcart instead of coming to meet him in her capacious landau, a lack of attention for which he was grateful, since it left him his own master. He would have been less than human if he had not stopped at the Homestead, and being in his present frame of mind very human, he pulled up the eager homeward-going horse at the little wooden gate, and flung the reins to the groom.
“I am going to make a call here; wait five minutes, and if I am not out by that time take the horse to the inn and put him up for an hour.”
“Yes, sir.”
How lightly his feet mounted the steep garden path between the trim box borders! There were plenty of flowers in the garden now—sweet-smelling hyacinths, vivid scarlet tulips with wide open chalices, half full of rain; a snowy mesphilus flinging about its frail white blooms in the soft west wind; a crimson rhododendron making a blaze of colour.
The long, low cottage, with its massive porch, was covered with flowering creepers, yellow jasmine, pale pink japonica, scented white honeysuckle. The cottage looked like a bower, and seemed to smile at him as he went up the path. He had a childish fancy that he would rather live in that cottage with Eve for his wife than at Merewood, which was one of the prettiest and most convenient houses of moderate size in all Hampshire. What dwelling could ever be so dear as this quaint old cottage, bent under the burden of its disproportionate thatch, with lattice windows peeping out at odd levels, and with dormers like gigantic eyes under penthouse lids?
She was at home; everybody was at home, even that undomestic bird, the Colonel. They were all at tea in their one spacious parlour—windows open, and all the perfume of flowers and growing hedgerows and budding trees blowing into the room.
Colonel Marchant welcomed him with marked cordiality. The girls were evidently pleased at his coming.
“How good of you to call on us on your way from the station!” said Sophy. “Lady Hartley told us you were to be met by the afternoon train.”
Lo, a miracle! The five Miss Marchants were all dressed alike—severely, in darkest blue serge. The red Garibaldis, the yellow and brown stripes, the scarlet, the magenta, the Reckitt’s blue, which had made their sitting-room a battlefield of crude colours, had all vanished. In darkest serge, with neat white linen collars, the Miss Marchants stood before him, a family to whose attire the severest taste could not object.
Eve was the most silent of the sisters, but she had blushed vividly at his advent, and she was blushing still. She blushed at every word he addressed to her, and seemed to find a painful difficulty in handling the teapot and cups and saucers when she resumed her post at the tea-tray.
Vansittart asked them for the news of the neighbourhood. How had they managed to amuse themselves after the frost, when there was no more skating?
“We were awfully sorry,” said Sophy, “but the hunting men were awfully glad.”
“And had you any more balls?”
“No public ball—but there were a good many dances,” with half a sigh. “Lady Hartley gave one just before Lent, the only one to which we were invited, and I am happy to say it was out and away the best.”
“Lady Hartley has been more than kind to us,” said Eve, finding speech at last. “She is the most charming woman I ever met. You must be very proud of such a sister.”
“I am proud to know that you like her,” answered Vansittart, in a low voice.
He was sitting at her elbow, helping her by handing the cups and saucers, and very conscious that her hand trembled when it touched his.
“My daughter is right,” said the Colonel, with a majestic air; “Lady Hartley is the one lady in this neighbourhood—the one womanly woman. She saw my girls ignored, and she has made it her business to convince her neighbours that they are a little too good for such treatment. Other people have been prompt to follow her lead.”
“Oh, but it’s not for that we care. It is Lady Hartley’s friendship we value, not her influence on other people,” protested Eve eagerly.
“We are going to Redwold tomorrow afternoon,” said Jenny; “but I don’t suppose we shall see you, Mr. Vansittart. You will be shooting, or fishing, or something.”
“Shooting there is none, Miss Vansittart. The pheasants are a free and unfettered company in the copses, among the primroses and dog-violets. Man is no longer their enemy. And I never felt the angler’s passion since I fished for sticklebacks in the shrubbery at home.”
The Colonel chimed in at this point, as if thinking the conversation too childish.
He began to discuss the political situation—the chances of a by-election which was to come on directly after Easter. He expressed himself with the ferocity of an old-fashioned Tory. He would give no quarter to the enemy. He had just returned from Paris, he told Vansittart, and had seen what it was to live under a mobocracy.
“They have been obliged to shut up one of their theatres—cut short the run of
