"Go and stir him up," said Jill, alluding to the absent Mr Rooke. "Tell him to come and talk to me. Where's the nearest fire? I want to get right over it and huddle."
"The fire's burning nicely in the sitting-room, miss."
Jill hurried into the sitting-room, and increased her hold on Parker's esteem by exclaiming rapturously at the sight that greeted her. Parker had expended time and trouble over the sitting-room. There was no dust, no untidiness. The pictures all hung straight; the cushions were smooth and unrumpled; and a fire of exactly the right dimensions burned cheerfully in the grate, flickering cosily on the small piano by the couch, on the deep leather arm-chairs which Freddie had brought with him from Oxford, that home of comfortable chairs, and on the photographs that studded the walls. In the center of the mantelpiece, the place of honor, was the photograph of herself which she had given Derek a week ago.
"You're simply wonderful, Parker! I don't see how you manage to make a room so cosy!" Jill sat down on the club-fender that guarded the fireplace, and held her hands over the blaze. "I can't understand why men ever marry. Fancy having to give up all this!"
"I am gratified that you appreciate it, miss. I did my best to make it comfortable for you. I fancy I hear Mr Rooke coming now."
"I hope the others won't be long. I'm starving. Has Mrs Parker got something very good for dinner?"
"She has strained every nerve, miss."
"Then I'm sure it's worth waiting for. Hullo, Freddie."
Freddie Rooke, resplendent in evening dress, bustled in, patting his tie with solicitous fingers. It had been right when he had looked in the glass in his bedroom, but you never know about ties. Sometimes they stay right, sometimes they wiggle up sideways. Life is full of these anxieties.
"I shouldn't touch it," said Jill. "It looks beautiful, and, if I may say so in confidence, is having a most disturbing effect on my emotional nature. I'm not at all sure I shall be able to resist it right through the evening. It isn't fair of you to try to alienate the affections of an engaged young person like this."
Freddie squinted down, and became calmer.
"Hullo, Jill, old thing. Nobody here yet?"
"Well, I'm here,—the petite figure seated on the fender. But perhaps I don't count."
"Oh, I didn't mean that, you know."
"I should hope not, when I've bought a special new dress just to fascinate you. A creation I mean. When they cost as much as this one did, you have to call them names. What do you think of it?"
Freddie seated himself on another section of the fender, and regarded her with the eye of an expert. A snappy dresser, as the technical term is, himself, he appreciated snap in the outer covering of the other sex.
"Topping!" he said spaciously. "No other word for it! All wool and a yard wide! Precisely as mother makes it! You look like a thingummy."
"How splendid! All my life I've wanted to look like a thingummy, but somehow I've never been able to manage it."
"A wood-nymph!" exclaimed Freddie, in a burst of unwonted imagery.
"Wood-nymphs didn't wear creations."
"Well, you know what I mean!" He looked at her with honest admiration. "Dash it, Jill, you know, there's something about you! You're—what's the word?—you've got such small bones!"
"Ugh! I suppose it's a compliment, but how horrible it sounds! It makes me feel like a skeleton."
"I mean to say, you're—you're dainty!"
"That's much better."
"You look as if you weighed about an ounce and a half! You look like a bit of thistledown! You're a little fairy princess, dash it!"
"Freddie! This is eloquence!" Jill raised her left hand, and twiddled a ringed finger ostentatiously. "Er—you do realize that I'm bespoke, don't you, and that my heart, alas, is another's? Because you sound as if you were going to propose."
Freddie produced a snowy handkerchief, and polished his eye-glass. Solemnity descended on him like a cloud. He looked at Jill with an earnest, paternal gaze.
"That reminds me," he said. "I wanted to have, a bit of a talk with you about that—being engaged and all that sort of thing. I'm glad I got you alone before the Curse arrived."
"Curse? Do you mean Derek's mother? That sounds cheerful and encouraging."
"Well, she is, you know," said Freddie earnestly. "She's a bird! It would be idle to deny it. She always puts the fear of God into me. I never know what to say to her."
"Why don't you try asking her riddles?"
"It's no joking matter," persisted Freddie, his amiable face overcast. "Wait till you meet her! You should have seen her at the station this morning. You don't know what you're up against!"
"You make my flesh creep, Freddie. What am I up against?"
Freddie poked the fire scientifically, and assisted it with coal.
"It's this way," he said. "Of course, dear old Derek's the finest chap in the world."
"I know that," said Jill softly. She patted Freddie's hand with a little gesture of gratitude. Freddie's devotion to Derek was a thing that always touched her. She looked thoughtfully into the fire, and her eyes seemed to glow in sympathy with the glowing coals. "There's nobody like him!"
"But," continued Freddie, "he always has been frightfully under his mother's thumb, you know."
Jill was conscious of a little flicker of irritation.
"Don't be absurd, Freddie. How could a man like Derek be under anybody's thumb?"
"Well, you know what I mean!"
"I don't in the least know what you mean."
"I mean, it would be rather rotten if his mother set him against you."
Jill clenched her teeth. The quick temper which always lurked so very little beneath the surface of her cheerfulness was stirred. She felt suddenly chilled and miserable. She tried to tell herself that Freddie was just an amiable blunderer who spoke without sense or reason, but it was no use. She could not rid herself of a feeling of foreboding and discomfort. It had been the one jarring note in the sweet melody of her love-story, this apprehension of Derek's regarding his mother. The Derek she loved was a strong man, with a strong man's contempt for other people's criticism; and there had been something ignoble and fussy in his attitude regarding Lady Underhill. She had tried to feel that the flaw in her idol did not exist. And here was Freddie Rooke, a man who admired Derek with all his hero-worshipping nature, pointing it out independently. She was annoyed, and she expended her annoyance, as women will do, upon the innocent bystander.
"Do you remember the time I turned the hose on you, Freddie," she said, rising from the fender, "years ago, when we were children, when you and that awful Mason boy—what was his name? Wally Mason—teased me?" She looked at the unhappy Freddie with a hostile eye. It was his blundering words that had spoiled everything. "I've forgotten what it was all about, but I know that you and Wally infuriated me and I turned the garden hose on you and soaked you both to the skin. Well, all I want to point out is that, if you go on talking nonsense about Derek and his mother and me, I shall ask Parker to bring me a jug of water, and I shall empty it over you! Set him against me! You talk as if love were a thing any third party could come along and turn off with a tap! Do you suppose that, when two people love each other as Derek and I do, that it can possibly matter in the least what anybody else thinks or says, even if it is his mother? I haven't got a mother, but suppose Uncle Chris came and warned me against Derek …"