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Tobias Finch, made his appearance, and the service began. Mrs. de Tracy had entered the pew first, naturally; Miss Smeardon sat next, then Robinetta. Lavendar occupied the pew in front, alone, and through her half-closed eyelids Robinetta could see the line of his lean cheek and bony temple.
Every time that he glanced up from his work, and he did so pretty often, his eyes fell on a picture that hung upon the opposite wall. It was the copy of Sir Joshua's "Robinetta" made long ago and just presented to its namesake.
"I hope you are not hungry, Robinetta," said Mrs. de Tracy, "that you have to buy food in Weston." "No, indeed," said Robinette, "I was only longing to test Carnaby's generosity and educate him in buying trifles for pretty ladies."
"Then you haven't visited your National Gallery faithfully enough," said Mrs. Loring. "Robinetta is one of the Sir Joshua pictures there, you know, and it was a great favourite of my mother's in her girlhood. Indeed she saved up her pin-money for nearly two years that she might have a good copy of it made to hang in her bedroom where she could look at it night and morning."
"This was my mother's," said Robinette. "It is a picture hanging in the smoking room; one that was a great favorite of hers, called 'Robinetta. Her drawing-master found an Italian artist in London who went to the National Gallery and made a copy of the Sir Joshua picture, and I was named after it." "I wish your mother could have been a little less romantic," sighed Mrs. de Tracy.
Before the Manor was reached, Robinetta and Carnaby had sworn eternal friendship deeper than any cousinship, they both declared. They met upon a sort of platform of Stoke Revel, predestined to sympathy upon all its salient characteristics; two naughty children on a holiday. "Do you get enough to eat here?" asked Carnaby in a hollow whisper, in the drawing-room before lunch.
The two young people set off in high spirits, and Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon watched them as they walked down the avenue on their way to the station, their clasped hands swinging in a merry rhythm as they hummed a bit of the last popular song. "I hope Robinetta will not Americanize Carnaby," said Mrs. de Tracy. "He seems so foolishly elated, so feverishly gay all at once.
"Do the clergymen over here always dress like that?" inquired Robinetta, trying to suppress a tendency to laugh at his slang. "Cassock?" said Carnaby. "Toby wouldn't be seen without it. High, you know! Bicycles in it. Fact! Goes to bed in it, I believe." "Carnaby, Carnaby! Come away!" said Lavendar. "Restrain these flights of imagination! Don't you see how they shock Mrs. Loring?"
"Of course I have enough, Middy," answered Robinetta with unconscious reservation. She had rejected "Carnaby" at once as a name quite impossible: he was "Middy" to her almost from the first moment of their acquaintance. "Enough?" he ejaculated, "I don't! I'd never be fed if it weren't for old Bates and Mrs. Smith and Cooky." Bates was the butler, Mrs.
"Then you were named after the picture?" "I was named from the memory of it," said Robinette, trailing her hand through the clear water. Mother told me that when I was first put into her arms she thought suddenly, as she saw my dark head, 'Here is my own Robinetta, in place of the one I left behind, and fell asleep straight away, full of joy and content."
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