"Won't you, since you _are_ here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup of tea?"

She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one has a better right!"

"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit us. You see we are two."

The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.

"She's a perfect dear, isn't she--a dear. So you are riding her then?

Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."

As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled.

"Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."

"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived in, as, of course, you know."

"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell me if you have come to see me as a messenger."

"And if I have?"

It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron and the toast was a feather.

"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed.

"I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for another cup, for I am n.o.body's messenger or envoy, my dear, n.o.body's.

I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm not very clever at putting on things."

The d.u.c.h.ess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a second cup of tea, slowly.

"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said, "and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture of you indeed."

She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.

"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category.

But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at Newport, don't you see?"

Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth of December, and with no such tea or fire----"

"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted--only----"

Bulstrode interposed: "Don't at least for a few moments entertain any 'buts' and 'onlys'--they are nearly as bad as those magical travelling trunks that would transport me to the United States. It is so--let me say--neutral in this place, I should think I might remain. I don't know why you are here or with whom, nor for how long, or for how deep, but it is singularly perfect to have found you."

His hostess had left her seat behind the table, and taking a chair by the fireside where Bulstrode was sitting, undid the ribbons of her garden hat and let the basket-like object fall on the floor.

"You must promise me, first of all, that you will not say you have seen me. Otherwise I shall leave here to-morrow and n.o.body shall ever again know where I am."

However her command might conflict with what was in his mind, he was obliged to give her his word. He had no right not to do so.

"And nothing," she said, "must make you break this promise, Mr.

Bulstrode. I know how good you are, and how you do all sorts of Quixotic funny things, but in this case please--please----"

"Mind my own business?" he nodded. "I will, d.u.c.h.ess, I will."

She looked at him steadily a moment and seemed satisfied, for she relaxed the tensity of her manner, which was the first Americanism she had displayed, and in her pretty soft drawl asked him, with less perfunctory interest than her words implied: "You are at Westboro'?"

"Yes, since the twenty-fifth."

"And you're staying on?"

"I seem to be more or less of a fixture--until the holidays, I expect."

"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes--isn't it really too delightful?"

He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have ever seen."

"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many others but it's more perfect, more like a home."

Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him.

Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no longer existed in the d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro'. She had refined very much indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English d.u.c.h.ess.

She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so, and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes--it was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all; they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their profound and deeply circled gray.

"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment.

Then--"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV.

rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men.

There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so?

And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court?

Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace bal.u.s.trade--or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you wouldn't as a girl does."

A _girl_--with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.

"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them.

Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told me so."

She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another question.

"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West Rooms'?"

She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless, showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her voice as she said:

"Oh, those West Rooms--you have those."

And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite knew how her thoughts travelled down the hall to the open nursery doors with their waiting gates. Whatever were her reasons for being here, Bulstrode saw that he had surprised her in a moment of sadness, and that his visit in spite of his indiscretion, was not wholly unwelcome.

But in the sudden way coming upon some one connected with her own life, she had been completely taken unawares, and her lapse into something like sentiment was short. Even as he looked at her she hardened.

"You have naturally not asked me anything, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, coldly enough now, "and more naturally still I have no explanations to give. By to-morrow I may be gone. I may live here for the rest of my life. I never leave my garden, I am quite unknown to the people about.

If any one in Westboro' learns that I am here I shall leave at once.

You will not come again. It is discourteous to say so--to ask it."

He had risen from his chair.