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Imogen at once asked her to spend a week-end at Thremdon Hall next Spring, and Miss Bocock in the same way said: "Thanks. That will be very nice. I've never stayed there."
Her mother still loved her, that was the helpless conviction that settled upon her; but it was as a child, not as a personality, that she was loved, very much as Miss Bocock respected her as the mistress of Thremdon Hall and not at all on her own account; but her mother, too, for all her quiet, and all her kindness, thought her "self-centered, self-righteous, cold-hearted," and Imogen, in a sharp pang of insight, saw it all because of that would not attempt any soul-stirring appeal or arraignment.
Then it appeared that Miss Bocock and Sir Basil were acquainted; they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered local questions. Miss Bocock's people lived not so many miles from Thremdon Hall, and, though she had been little at home of late years, she and Sir Basil had country memories in common.
Upton was in the drawing-room next morning when Sir Basil Thremdon was announced. She had not seen this old friend and neighbor since the news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a consciousness of all that had changed for her, a consciousness, perhaps more keen, of all that had changed for him, showed in a deepening of her color.
It was since coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie Upton's cottage stood among its trees.
There was still a subtle irritation in the fact that while Miss Bocock now accepted her, in the order of things, as one of the "county people," as the gracious mistress of Thremdon Hall, as very much above a country doctor's family, she didn't seem to regard her with any more interest or respect as an individual.
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