But instead of sitting down Mrs. Penfold ran to the window, exclaiming on the beauty of the view, the garden, the trees, and the bold profile of the old keep, thrown forward among the flowers.  There was nothing the least distinguished in her ecstasy.  But it flowed and bubbled with perfect sincerity; and Lady Tatham did not dislike it at all.

“A lady”—­she thought—­“quite a lady, though rather a goose.  The daughter is uncomfortable.”

And she glanced at the slightly flushed face of Lydia, who followed in their wake, every now and then replying, as politeness demanded, to some appeal from her mother.  It was indeed clear that the visit had been none of her doing.

Grace?—­personality?—­Lady Tatham divined them, from the way the girl moved, from the look in her gray-blue eyes, from the carriage of her head.  She was certainly pretty, with that proud virginal beauty which often bears itself on the defensive, in our modern world where a certain superfluity of women has not tended to chivalry.  But how little prettiness matters, beside the other thing!—­the indefinable, irresistible something—­which gives the sceptre and the crown!  All the time she was listening to Mrs. Penfold’s chatter, and the daughter’s occasional words, Victoria Tatham was on the watch for this something; and not without jealousy and a critical mind.  She had been taken by surprise; and she resented it.

Harry was very long in coming back!—­in order she supposed to give her time to make acquaintance.

But at last she had them at the tea-table, and Mrs. Penfold’s adjectives were a little quenched.  Each side considered the other.  Lady Tatham’s dress, her old hat, and country shoes attracted Lydia, no less than the boyish, open-air look, which still survived through all the signs of a complex life and a cosmopolitan experience.  Mrs. Penfold, on her part, thought the old hat, and the square-toed shoes “unsuitable.”  In her young days great ladies “dressed” in the afternoons.

“Do you like your cottage?” Lady Tatham inquired.

Mrs. Penfold replied that nothing could be more to their taste—­except for the motors and the dust.

“Ah! that’s my fault,” said a voice behind her.  “All motorists are brutes.  I say, it was jolly of you to come!”

So saying, Tatham found a place between his mother and Mrs. Penfold, looking across at Lydia.  Youth, happiness, manly strength came in with him.  He had no features to speak of—­round cheeks, a mouth generally slightly open, and given to smiling, a clear brow, a red and white complexion, a babyish chin, thick fair hair, and a countenance neither reserved nor foolishly indiscreet.  Tatham’s physical eminence—­and it was undisputed—­lay not in his plain, good-tempered face, but in the young perfection of his athlete’s form.  Among spectacles, his mother, at least, asked nothing better than to see him on horseback or swinging a golf-club.