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His good-looking, shrewd, elderly face lighted with a fine smile. "My handsome Betty has saved us a good deal by carrying out her fifteen-year-old plan of going to find her sister," he ended. Before they landed they had decided that Mrs. Vanderpoel should be comfortably established in a hotel in London, and that after this was arranged, her husband should go to Stornham Court alone.
And now such inspiriting events as were everyday happenings in lucky places like Westerbridge and Wratcham and Yangford, showed signs of being about to occur in Stornham itself. To begin with, even before the journey to London, Kedgers had made two or three visits to The Clock, and had been in a communicative mood.
"D'ye do, Wells," he said, and strode past him to speak to the footman who had come from Stornham Court with the carriage. The new and nervous little Lady Anstruthers, who was left to trot after her husband, smiled again at the ruddy, kind-looking fellow, this time in conscious deprecation.
She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved. Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin. Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again.
He objected intensely to this letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices. "You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said. "You have put it out of his power to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration you can show is to let New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon the other side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into Stornham Court."
Since his return to Stornham the outward decorum of his own conduct had entertained him and he had kept it up with an increasing appreciation of its usefulness in the present situation. Whatsoever happened in the end, it was the part of discretion to present to the rural world about him an appearance of upright behaviour.
She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke. "One would begin at the fences," she said. "Don't you think so?" "That is practical." "That is where I shall begin at Stornham," reflectively. "You are going to begin at Stornham?" "How could one help it?
She was aware that in the first years of his married life he had alternately resented the scarcity of the invitations sent them and rudely refused such as were received. Since he had returned to find her at Stornham, he had insisted that no invitations should be declined, and had escorted his wife and herself wherever they went.
The one that's over here visiting her sister. Is it that one sure?" "Yes," from Mount Dunstan without fervour. "Lady Anstruthers lives at Stornham, about six miles from here." "Gee," with feverish regret. "If her father was there, and I could get next to him, my fortune would be made." "Should you," ventured Penzance politely, "endeavour to sell him a typewriter?" "A typewriter! Holy smoke!
The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling, confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well dressed, and of trained bearing. The entrance hall had lost its hopeless shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing.
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