Anne stood staring, with wild animal eyes that saw no place to run to.

It was Jerrold who saved her.

“I say, would you like to see my new buck rabbit?”

“Rather!”

He held out his hand and she ran on with him, along the terrace, down the steps at the corner and up the drive to the stable yard where the rabbits were.  Colin followed headlong.

And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, “I’ve sense enough to remember that her mother’s dead.”

In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.

iii

Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still smiling.  It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all discussion.

“It’s much too hot here,” she said.  “You might move the cushions down there under the beech-tree.”

That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it.  To Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting out.  She never lost her temper, and never replied to any serious criticism; she simply changed the subject, leaving you with your disapproval on your hands.

In this Eliot’s young subtlety misled him.  Adeline Fielding’s mind was not the clever, calculating thing that, at fifteen, he thought it.  Her one simple idea was to be happy and, as a means to that end, to have people happy about her.  His father, or Anne’s father, could have told him that all her ideas were simple as feelings and impromptu.  Impulse moved her, one moment, to seize on the faithful, defiant little heart of Anne, the next, to get up out of the sun.  Anne’s tears spoiled her bright world; but not for long.  Coolness was now the important thing, not Anne and not Anne’s mother.  As for Eliot’s disapproval, she was no longer aware of it.

“Oh, to be cool, to be cool again!  Thank you, my son.”

Eliot had moved all the cushions down under the tree, scowling as he did it, for he knew that when his mother was really cool he would have to get up and move them back again.

With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled in her lair, under her tree.

Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne’s father came towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.

Handsome even after fifteen years of India.  Handsomer than when he was young.  More distinguished.  Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze.  She liked his lean, eager, deerhound’s face, ready to start off, sniffing the trail.  A little strained, leashed now, John’s eagerness.  But that was how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if they could do things together.

She had tried to find his youth in Anne’s face; but Anne’s blackness and whiteness were her mother’s; her little nose was still soft and vague; you couldn’t tell what she would be like in five years’ time.  Still, there was something; the same strange quality; the same forward-springing grace.