ambers where intimacy might deepen or in gardens and under trees where
the stillness knew the click of balls and the good humour of games.
There had been chairs, on the terrace, pushed about; there were
ungathered teacups on the level top of the parapet; the servants in
fact, in the manner of "hands" mustered by a whistle on the deck of a
ship, had just arrived to restore things to an order soon again to be
broken. There were scattered couples in sight below and an idle group
on the lawn, out of the midst of which, in spite of its detachment,
somebody was sharp enough sometimes to cry "Out!" The high daylight was
still in the sky, but with just the foreknowledge already of the long
golden glow in which the many-voiced caw of the rooks would sound at
once sociable and sad. There was a great deal all about to be aware of
and to look at, but little Aggie had her eyes on a book over which her
pretty head was bent with a docility visible even from afar. "I've a
friend--down there by the lake--to go back to," the Duchess went on,
"and I'm on my way to my room to get a letter that I've promised to show
him. I shall immediately bring it down and then in a few minutes be
able to relieve you,--I don't leave her alone too much--one doesn't, you
know, in a house full of people, a child of that age. Besides"--and Mr.
Longdon's interlocutress was even more confiding--"I do want you so very
intensely to know her. You, par exemple, you're what I SHOULD like to
give her." Mr. Longdon looked the noble lady, in acknowledgement of her
appeal, straight in the face, and who can tell whether or no she acutely
guessed from his expression that he recognised this particular juncture
as written on the page of his doom?--whether she heard him inaudibly
say "Ah here it is: I knew it would have to come!" She would at any rate
have been astute enough, had this miracle occurred, quite to complete
his sense for her own understanding and suffer it to make no difference
in the tone in which she still confronted him. "Oh I take the bull by
the horns--I know you haven't wanted to know me. If you had you'd have
called on me--I've given you plenty of hints and little coughs. Now, you
see, I don't cough any more--I just rush at you and grab you. You don't
call on me--so I call on YOU. There isn't any indecency moreover that I
won't commit for my child."

Mr. Longdon's impenetrability crashed like glass at the elbow-touch
of this large handsome practised woman,