Allegra drooped in her sofa corner as the talk flowed round her. If Geoffrey included her in some passing allusion, he did not make the mistake of expecting an answer. It was this which gave Ione her most painful impression. The lifeless apathy, the silence, which were to her so startling and so new, were nothing of the sort to Jacqueline Delauny or to Geoffrey Trent. They were something to which they had become accustomed. With these thoughts in her mind, it said much for the charms of Geoffrey’s conversation that the evening passed with so little sense of strain.
At half past ten the following morning Ione set out to walk into the village. Geoffrey was apologetic over letting her go alone.
“I’d come with you, only I’m expecting this chap about the house. The church is always open, and you can buy picture-postcards at the general shop.” He laughed. “In fact a perfect riot of entertainment!”
She had not got very far beyond the gate, when the taxi which had brought her from Wraydon came into view at the end of the street. She was looking at it with interest and wondering what the expert was going to say about the Ladies’ House, when the car stopped a few yards away and Jim Severn jumped out. Ione was surprised to find how pleased she was to see him. Startled too. Because of all the unexpected things! Or was it?
He held her hand and forgot to let it go.
“Ione! Were you coming to meet me? How extraordinarily nice of you!”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t. You see you are a Dreadful Shock-because I hadn’t the faintest idea you were coming.”
“Didn’t your brother-in-law get my letter?”
She laughed.
“If you are ‘the chap he was going to see about the house,’ he did. But that’s all I knew. He didn’t mention your name.”
“Well, it was put up to our firm, and I thought I’d come myself. It’s a very interesting place by all accounts. And you told me you were going to be here on a visit.”
It was at this point that she became aware of the interested scrutiny of a stout woman with a mop of grey hair, an old man with a clay pipe between his teeth, a lumpy boy on a bicycle which he was balancing against a cottage wall, and the taxi driver. Jim Severn was still holding her hand, and the taxi’s meter was ticking up. With a fine bright colour in her cheeks, she detached herself and said,
“Hadn’t you better pay your taxi? You are just there, and I can show you the way.”
Jim Severn extracted a case from the back of the car and overpaid the driver, watched with the greatest interest by the little knot of sightseers, to whom a woman in a pixie hood and a little girl with her thumb in her mouth had now added themselves.
Just inside the gates of the Ladies’ House he stopped.
“Your brother-in-law seems very keen about getting this place. Do you know, we’ve had it to look over before-in ’33. There was an American who wanted to buy it then, and the owner wouldn’t sell-couldn’t in fact, because the heir was a minor. But the guardian, who was a Miss Falconer, gave the American a seven years’ lease with the option of renewal and let him make a lot of improvements-hot water system and all that sort of thing. My Uncle John went down himself, and he has dug out all his notes for me, and the plans. He was very anxious not to spoil the character of the place, and it’s no joke working a modern hot water system into one of these old houses, but I gather he made a pretty good job of it.”
“There is really hot water!”
They began to move again. The drive was quite a short one. It was too short. They reached the front door before either of them wished to.
Ione walked back to the village and bought picture-postcards.
She returned to find Geoffrey Trent in the highest of good humours. To have an expert to share his enthusiasm for the Ladies’ House, to talk about it to his heart’s content and to so agreeable a fellow as Jim Severn was an experience in which he was obviously revelling. And when he discovered the elder Mr. Severn’s previous connection with the house, and the fact that his nephew was a friend of Ione’s, nothing would serve him but that Jim must make a week-end of it and stay with them.
“It’s a sheer impossibility to get the hang of a place like this in an hour or two. You want to live with it, in it-you want to steep yourself in the atmosphere, before you can even begin to think of making a report.”
Jim Severn made no demur. He had, as a matter of fact, intended to put in the week-end in the neighbourhood-at the Station Hotel at Wraydon if nothing better turned up. He could take Ione out to lunch and see whether that strong sense of attraction held. The circumstances of their first meeting had been of the kind to stir the imagination. He found himself thinking about her in a very persistent way, and he wanted to check up on it. Sometimes these curious first impressions held, and sometimes they did not. It was a matter of ten years since he had been so disturbed over a woman, and he wanted to know where he stood. Love at first sight-well, it happened. Or love at the first sound of a voice which was not like any other. If he had only met her under the shroud of the fog and never seen her face, he would have known her anywhere and at any time the moment she opened her lips and spoke.
CHAPTER 12
Miss Maud Silver looked up from the card in her hand to the client whom Emma Meadows was ushering in, a short, broad person in the roughest of tweeds, stoutest of brogues, and the most sensible of country hats. Repeating the name which she had just read, Miss Silver said in a tone of mild enquiry,
“Miss Josepha Bowden?”
Her free hand was warmly grasped and wrung.
“How do you do? You have no idea what a relief it is to hear my name pronounced correctly. You have no idea of the number of people who just say Joseph and then add some kind of a little grunt. Most infuriating! It is, of course, pronounced as if the ‘e’ were doubled-Joseepha, and I cannot tell you how much pleasure it gave me to hear you say it properly.”
She seated herself in the chair which had been placed for her on the far side of the large writing-table, stripped off a pair of thick leather gloves, and said,
“You are Miss Maud Silver?”
Miss Silver inclined her head.
Miss Bowden’s eyes were fixed upon her. They were rather good eyes, grey with a growth of strongly curling lashes. Her hair which was streaked with grey curled too, and quite obviously without any other assistance than that of nature, one glance being enough to dispel the idea that she would ever bother about her appearance for longer than she could possibly help. She was fortunate in possessing what had once been a very fine complexion and was still, in spite of the buffetings of all kinds of weather in all quarters of the globe, an extraordinarily healthy and colourful affair. With her eyes on Miss Silver’s face she said,
“I have come to see you on a-well, I don’t know how to put it, and I hate beating about the bush, but it’s-well-it’s a delicate matter.”
A great many delicate matters had been brought into that room and laid before Miss Silver-in doubt, in perplexity, in dreadful anxiety, or mortal fear. Josepha Bowden went on.
“Elizabeth Moore is a distant connection of mine-she is Elizabeth Robertson now. She tells me you got her young man out of a mess, and what is a great deal more important so far as I am concerned, she says that you can hold your tongue, and that you actually do.”