“I hope so.  But as it’s only about ten-thirty a.m., lunch is merely a futurist dream at present.”

“I know.  I wonder why there are such enormous intervals between meals in the country?” said Nan speculatively.  “In town there’s never any time to get things in and meals are a perfect nuisance.  Here they seem to be the only breaks in the day.”

“That,” replied Sandy sententiously, “is because you’re leading an idle existence.  You’re not doing anything—­so of course there’s no time to do it in.”

“Not doing anything?  Well, what is there to do?” She flung out her hands with an odd little gesture of hopelessness.  “Besides, I am doing something—­I learned how to make puddings yesterday, and to-morrow I’m to be initiated into soup jellies—­you know, the kind of stuff you trot around to old women in the village at Christmas time.”

“Can’t the cook make them?”

“Of course she can.  But Lady Gertrude is appalled at my lack of domestic knowledge—­so soup jellies it has to be.”

Sandy regarded her thoughtfully.  She seemed spiritless, and the charming face held a gravity that was quite foreign to it.  In the searching winter sunlight he could even discern one or two faint lines about the violet-blue eyes, while the curving mouth, with its provocative short upper lip, drooped rather wearily at its corners.

“You’re bored stiff,” he told her firmly.  “Why don’t you run up to town for a few days and see your pals there?”

Nan shrugged her shoulders.

“For the excellent reason that half of them are away, or—­or married or something.”

Only a few days previously she had seen the announcement of Maryon Rooke’s marriage in the papers, and although the fact that he was married had now no power to wound her, it was like the snapping of yet another link with that happy, irresponsible, Bohemian life which she and Penelope had shared together.

“Sandy”—­she spoke impetuously.  “After I’m—­married, I don’t think I shall ever go to London again.  It would be like peeping into heaven.  Then the door would slam and I’d come back—­here!  I’m out of it now—­out of everything.  The others will all go on singing and playing and making books and pictures—­right in the heart of it all.  While I shall be stuck away here . . . by myself . . . making soup jellies!”

She sprang up and walked restlessly to the window, staring out at the undulating meadowland.

“I’m sick of the sight of those fields!” she exclaimed almost violently.  “The same deadly dull green fields day after day.  If—­if one of them would only turn pink for a change it would be a relief!” Her breath caught in a strangled sob.

Sandy followed her to the window.

“Look here, Nan, you can’t go on like this.”  There was an unaccustomed decision in his tones; the boyish inflection had gone.  It was a man who was speaking, and determinedly, too.  “You’ve no business to be everlastingly gazing at green fields.  You ought to be turning ’em into music so that the people who’ve got only bricks and mortar to stare at can get a whiff of them.”