Rosamund got up reluctantly. "Nanna's a regular tyrant!"

"Leave all this to me," he said. "I'll find the prescription if it's here."

She went off, and almost at once he came to a folded bit of paper.

Perhaps this was the prescription? He opened it, and this is what he read:--

March 12, 1919. This is the happiest day of my life. One of my G.o.dmothers has died and left me 50. I am going to buy two nanny-goats, a boy and a girl. They will have kids, and I shall make munny. We shall then have a propper cook, and I shall never help Betty wash up any more. I wish my other G.o.dmother would die. She is very genrus and kind--she would go strait to Heaven. But she is very h.e.l.lfy.

Poor little Timmy! Dear little unscrupulous child of nature! Would Timmy wish him, G.o.dfrey Radmore, dead, if some accident were to reveal to him what a great difference it would make to them all? He hoped not. But he couldn't feel sure, for, from being well-to-do the Tosswills must have become poor, painfully and, to his mind, unnaturally poor.

Further search proved the prescription was not in the play-box, and he went downstairs. Still that same unnatural silence through the house.

Where could Timmy be? Somehow he felt that he wanted to see Timmy and find out about the nanny-goats. He feared his G.o.dson's expectations of wealth had not been fulfilled, but he supposed that there was a "propper cook," probably the lack of her had been quite temporary.

He wandered into the drawing-room. In the old days all five sitting-rooms had been in use. Now four of them were closed, and the drawing-room was everybody's meeting place. Dolly was there working a carpet-sweeper languidly.

"Where's everybody?" he asked.

"I think Betty and Timmy are still in the scullery. I don't know where Rosamund is."

"I suppose _I_ can go into the scullery?"

She looked at him dubiously. "Yes, if you'd like to--certainly. Betty loves cooking and all that sort of thing. I hate it--so in our division of labour, I do the other kind of housework." She looked ruffled and he told himself, a little maliciously, that she was not unlike a lazy, rather incompetent, housemaid. "If it's Timmy you want," she continued, "I'll go and see if he can come."

"Please don't trouble. I'll find him all right."

Radmore went out into the pa.s.sage. As the baize door, which shut off the kitchen quarters, opened, he saw his G.o.dson and Rosamund before they saw him, and he heard Rosamund say, in a cross tone: "It only means that someone else will have to help her; I think it's very selfish of you, Timmy."

From being full of joy Timmy's face became downcast and sullen.

"Hullo!" Radmore called out, "I want you to show me the garden, Timmy.

Where's Betty?"

"She's in the scullery, of course. I tell you I _have_ done, Rosamund.

You _are_ a cruel pig--"

"Come, Timmy, don't speak to your sister like that."

It ended in the three of them going off--Rosamund to look for the prescription, and the other two into the garden.

Nanna waddled into the scullery: "I'll wipe up them things, Miss Betty," she said good-naturedly; "you go out to Mr. G.o.dfrey and Master Timmy--they was asking for you just now."

Betty hesitated--and then suddenly she made up her mind that, yes, she would do as Nanna suggested.

In early Victorian days women of Betty Tosswill's cla.s.s and kind worked many of their most anxious thoughts and fears, hopes and fancies, into the various forms of needlework which were then considered the only suitable kind of occupation for a young gentlewoman; and often Betty, when engaged on the long and arduous task of washing up for her big family party, pondered over the problems and secret anxieties which a.s.sailed her. Though something of a pain, it had also been to her a great relief to realise that the living flesh and blood G.o.dfrey Radmore of to-day had ousted the pa.s.sionately devoted, if unreasonable and violent, lover of her early girlhood. In the old days, intermingled with her deep love of Radmore, there had been a protective, almost maternal, feeling, and although Radmore had been four years older than herself, she had always felt the older of the two. But now, in spite of the responsible, anxious work she had done in France during the War, she felt that the roles were reversed, and that her one-time lover had become infinitely older than she was herself in knowledge of the world.

Old Nanna hoped that Miss Betty would go upstairs and change her plain cotton dress for something just a little prettier and that she would put on, maybe, a hat trimmed with daisies which Nanna admired. But Betty did nothing of the sort. She washed her hands at the sink, and then she went out into the hall, and taking up her big plain old garden hat went straight out into the keen autumnal air.

And then, as she caught sight of the tall man and of the little boy, she stayed her steps, overwhelmed by a flood of both sweet and bitter memories.

During the year which had followed the breaking of her engagement there had been corners and by-ways of the big, rambling old garden filled with poignant, almost unbearable, a.s.sociations of the days when she and G.o.dfrey had been lovers. There had been certain nooks and hidden oases where it had been agony to go. She had considered all kinds of things as being possible. Perhaps her most certain conviction had been that he would come back some day with a wife whom she, Betty, would try to teach herself to love; but never had she visioned what had now actually occurred, that is Radmore's quiet, commonplace falling-back into the day-to-day life of Old Place.

All at once she heard Timmy's clear treble voice:--"Hullo! There's Betty."

Radmore turned and said something Betty did not hear, and the child went off like an arrow from the bow. Then Radmore, turning, came towards her quickly. She had no clue to the strange look of pain and indecision on his face, and her heart began to beat, strangely.

When close to her:--"Betty," he said in a low voice, "I want to tell you that I didn't know about George till last night. How could you think I did?"

"I suppose one does think unjust things when one's in great trouble," she answered.

He felt hurt and angry and showed it. "I should have thought you would all have known me well enough to know that I should have written at once--at once. Why, the whole world's altered now that I know that George is no longer in it! Perhaps that sounds foolish and exaggerated, as I never wrote to him. But I think _you'll_ know what I mean, Betty? It was all right, as long as I knew he was somewhere, happy."

She said almost inaudibly:--"I think that he is happy somewhere. You know--but no, you don't know--that George was a born soldier. Those months after he joined up, and until he was killed, were, I do believe, by far the happiest of his life. He always said they were."

As he made no answer she went on:--"I'll show you some of his letters if you like, and father will show you the letters that were sent to us--afterwards."

By now they had left the garden proper, and were walking down an avenue which was known as the Long Walk. It was here that they two, with George always as a welcome third, used to play "tip and run" and "hide and seek"

with the then little children.

"Tell me something about the others," he said abruptly. "I'm moving in a world unrealised."

She smiled up into his face. Somehow that confession touched her, and brought them nearer to one another.

"Jack frightens me a bit, you know--he's so unlike George. And then the girls? Is it true what Timmy says--that Rosamund wants to be an actress?"

There was a slight tone of censorious surprise in his voice, and Betty reddened.

"I don't see why she shouldn't be an actress if she wants to be! Father's making her wait till she's twenty-one."

"Let me see," he said hesitatingly, "Dolly's older than Jack, isn't she?"

"Oh, no. Dolly will only be twenty next Thursday."

There came over her an overwhelming impulse to tell him something--the sort of thing she could only have told George.

"You know that pretty old church at Oakford?"

He nodded.

"Well, Mr. Runsby is dead. They've got a bachelor clergyman now, and Janet and I think that he's becoming very fond of Dolly! He's away just now, or you would have already seen him. He's very often over here."

"I should have thought--" He hesitated in his turn, but already he was falling again into the way of saying exactly what he thought right out to Betty--"that with you and Rosamund in the house, no one would look at Dolly!"

Betty blushed, and for a fleeting moment G.o.dfrey saw the blushing, dimpling Betty of long ago.

"Rosamund has the utmost contempt for him. As for me, he never sees me--I'm always in the kitchen when he comes here." She added with a touch of the quiet humour he remembered, "I don't think Dolly's in any danger from me!"

"_Why_ are you always in the kitchen, Betty?" he asked. "Is it really necessary?"