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So you've hurt your leg, sir? Keep still! We can sit three.... Now, my dear, I can kiss you! You've grown!" Lady Casterley's kiss, once received, was never forgotten; neither perhaps was Barbara's. Yet they were different.
And once more the memory of Lady Casterley's words; the memory of the two figures with joined hands on the balcony above the election crowd; all his latent jealousy of this handsome young Colossus, his animus against one whom he could, as it were, smell out to be always fighting on the winning side; all his consciousness too of what a lost cause his own was, his doubt whether he were honourable to look on it as a cause at all, flared up in Courtier, so that his answer was a stare.
"It has been your sentimental folly," came Lady Casterley's voice from a far corner, "which has brought this on the boy." Responding to the pressure of the hand, back now at her waist, Barbara did not answer; and the sound of the little feet retracing their steps rose in the stillness. Neither of those two at the window turned their heads; once more the feet receded, and again began coming back.
"Just a line, dear, before the post goes, to tell you that Babs has gone off happily. The child looked beautiful. She sent you her love, and some absurd message that you would be glad to hear, she was perfectly safe, with both feet firmly on the ground." A grim little smile played on Lady Casterley's pale lips: Yes, indeed, and time too! The child had been very near the edge of the cliffs!
And as if it had been jerked out of her, she said: "I don't want to hurt you, my dear. It's about my grandson, of course." But Mrs. Noel made neither sign nor motion; and the feeling of irritation which so rapidly attacks the old when confronted by the unexpected, came to Lady Casterley's aid. "His name," she said, "is being coupled with yours in a way that's doing him a great deal of harm.
Noel was not in the sitting-room, and going to the bedroom door, the girl looked in. She was standing by the bed, drawing her hand over and over the white surface of the pillow. Stealing noiselessly back, Barbara caught up the bunch of lilies, and fled. Miltoun, whose constitution, had the steel-like quality of Lady Casterley's, had a very rapid convalescence.
The bull was now distant some eighty yards, and they were still quite a hundred from the stile. "Granny," said Barbara, "if you don't go on as I tell you, I shall just leave you, and go and meet him! You mustn't be obstinate!" Lady Casterley's answer was to grip her granddaughter round the waist; the nervous force of that thin arm was surprising. "You will do nothing of the sort," she said.
This woman to her great credit I say to her great credit has gone away, so as to put herself out of Eustace's reach, until he has recovered his senses." With a sharp-drawn breath Barbara said: "Oh! poor thing!" But on Lady Casterley's face had come an almost cruel look. "Ah!" she said: "Exactly. But, curiously enough, I am thinking of Eustace."
But noticing that Barbara's lips had closed tightly, she gave her arm a hard if unintentional-pinch, and walked on. Lady Casterley's rather malicious diagnosis of Audrey Noel was correct.
Geoffrey Winlow; having sent his wife on, had flown over in his biplane from Winkleigh, and brought a copy of 'the rag' with him. The one member of the small house-party who had not heard the report before dinner was Lord Dennis Fitz-Harold, Lady Casterley's brother. Little, of course, was said.
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