The Vision of Desire
people's business. Her hair, once flaxen, was now turning the ugly
yellowish grey which is the fair woman's curse, and her eyes were like pale
blue china beads.
She appeared, accompanied by the rector, about half an hour after Maria had
brought in tea, and seemed overwhelmed to discover that Ann herself had
only just arrived.
"I really must apologise," she declared, in the voice of a superior person
making a very generous concession. "I quite thought you were expecting your
sister yesterday, Mr. Lovell. I told you so, didn't I, Brian?" She appealed
to her brother, who nodded rather unhappily. "And we thought we'd like to
call as soon as possible and welcome you to the parish."
Ann didn't believe a word of it.
"She knew perfectly well you were expecting me to-day," she declared when,
later on, she and Robin found themselves alone again. "Though I haven't the
slightest doubt she told that nice brother of hers just what she wished him
to believe. She simply wanted to have first look at me so as to be able to
give the village to-morrow a full, true, and particular account of what I'm
like."
However, she replied to Miss Caroline's apologies with the necessary
cordiality demanded by the occasion and, ringing for Maria, ordered fresh
tea. The rector protested.
"No, no," he said hastily. "You must be far too tired to want visitors when
you've only just come off a long journey. We'll pay our call another day."
Brian Tempest was the very antithesis of his sister--tall and somewhat
ascetic-looking, with a face to which one was almost tempted to apply the
word beautiful, it was so well-proportioned and cut with the sure fineness
of a cameo. His dark hair was sprinkled with grey at the temples, and
beneath a broad, tranquil brow looked out a pair of kindly, luminous eyes
that were neither all brown nor all grey. Later, when she knew him better,
Ann was wont to inform him that his eyes were a "heather mixture--like
tweed." Small, fine lines puckered humorously at their corners, and there
was humour, too, in the long, thin-lipped mouth.
Robin and Ann brushed aside his protest with a hearty sincerity there was
no mistaking. Whatever each of them might feel concerning Miss Caroline,
they were in complete accord in the welcome they extended to her brother.
He was no stranger to Robin. The latter had put up at the village inn
during the time occupied by Maria Coombe in "cleaning down" the Cottage and
making it habitable, and the rector had dropped in to see him in a
characteristically informal, friendly fashion on more than one occasion.
The two chatted together while Miss Caroline put Ann through a searching
catechism as to her past, present, and future mode of life, including the
age at which her parents had died, the particular kind of work she had
undertaken during the war--appearing somewhat taken aback when Ann
explained that she had driven a car, the making of shirts and mufflers
coming more within the scope of Caroline's own idea as to what was
"suitable" work for a young girl--and the length of time she had lived with
Lady Susan. The coincidence of Robin's obtaining a post in the
neighbourhood of Lady Susan's home impressed her enormously, as fate's
unexpected shufflings of the cards invariably do impress those whose
existence is passed in a very narrow groove.
"It's really most extraordinary!" she declared, scrutinising Ann much as
though she suspected her of having somehow juggled matters in order to
produce such a phenomenon. "Did you hear that, Brian? Miss Lovell has been
living with our dear Lady Susan." She spoke as if she held proprietary
rights in Lady Susan. "Isn't it extraordinary that now she and her brother
should have come to live so near White Windows?"
"I think it's a very charming happening," replied the rector, "since
Oldstone Cottage is even nearer to the rectory!"
He smiled across at Ann--a quick, sympathetic smile that seemed to
establish them on a footing of friendly intimacy at once.
"Really," went on Miss Caroline, doggedly pursuing the line of thought to
the bitter end of her commonplace mind, "it's as though it were _meant_ in
some way--that you should come to Silverquay."
"Probably it was," returned the rector simply, and Ann observed a quiet,
dreaming expression come into his eyes--a look of inner vision, tranquilly
content and confident.
"Fancy if it turns out like that!" exclaimed Miss Caroline. "It would be a
most singular thing, wouldn't it, if it was really _intended_?"
"Not at all," answered Brian composedly. "You're speaking as though you
regarded the Almighty as a thoughtless kind of person who would let things
happen, just anyhow."
"Brian!" Miss Caroline's tones shuddered with shocked reproach. Her brother
often shocked her; he seemed to think of God as simply and naturally as he
might of any other friend. She herself, in the course of her parochial work
in the village, habitually represented Him as a somewhat prying and easily
offended individual who kept a particularly sharp eye on the inhabitants of
Silverquay.
She hastily turned the conversation on to less debatable ground.
"We shall have quite a lot of fresh people in the neighbourhood," she
remarked sociably. "Mr. Coventry himself is a stranger to us all, and then
there will be a new-comer at the Priory, too."
"Mrs. Hilyard, you mean?" said Robin.
"Yes." Miss Caroline looked full of importance. "I hear she arrives to-day.
The carrier told our cook that he was ordered to meet the four-thirty train
this afternoon--to fetch a quantity of luggage."
"Is there a _Mr._ Hilyard?" asked Ann casually. She could see that Miss
Caroline was bursting with gossipy news which she was aching to impart.
"No, she's a widow, I hear, and very wealthy. The furniture that's been
coming down by rail is of most excellent quality--most excellent!"
"How do you know, Caroline?" inquired the rector, his eyes twinkling with
amusement.
"Well, _entirely_ by accident, I happened to be taking a basin of chicken
broth to old Mrs. Skinner--you know, she lives in one of the Priory
cottages--on the very day the pantechnicons were delivering at the house,
and I saw quite a number of the chairs and tables as they were being
carried in."
The twinkle in Brian's eyes grew more pronounced.
"I'm afraid you must have stood and watched the unloading process, then."
"Well, I suppose I did--just for a minute," she acknowledged, adding with
some asperity: "It would be quite fitting if you took a little keener
interest in future parishioners, Brian."
"My interest in my future parishioners is quite keen, I assure you--though
I don't know that it extends to their furniture," replied the rector,
laughing.
"Oh, well, it's nice to know that some one has taken the Priory who is in a
position to keep it up properly," persisted his sister. "Don't you agree,
Miss Lovell?"
"Of course," said Ann. "Besides"--smiling across at the rector--"as we're
as poor as church mice, it's just as well the new arrival at the Priory
should he rich--to even things up."
"I think it's all very interesting," pursued Miss Caroline, still intent on
her own train of thought. "Here's Mr. Coventry come home at last to live at
Heronsmere--a very eligible bachelor--and with this Mrs. Hilyard, a wealthy
widow, living so near by it wouldn't be at all surprising if something came
of it."
The rector jumped up, laughing good-humouredly.
"Caroline! Caroline! I must really take you home after that, or Miss Lovell
will think Silverquay is a veritable hot-bed of gossip. Coventry hasn't
been in the neighbourhood a month, poor man, and here you are trying to tie
him up with a lady who doesn't even arrive until this afternoon!"
"Besides," suggested Robin, smiling broadly, "she may be a really
disconsolate widow, you know."
Miss Caroline shook her head.
"I don't think so," she answered obstinately. "The furniture didn't look
like it. One of the packages was a little torn, and I caught sight of the
curtains inside. They were rose colour."
"That was really quite bright of Miss Caroline," observed Ann with some
amusement, when the rector and his sister had started for home. "Only she
didn't know it!"
CHAPTER X
A DISCOVERY
The morning breeze darted in and out of Ann's bedroom like a child
tentatively trying to inveigle a grown-up person into playing
hide-and-seek. With every puff a big cluster of roses, which had climbed to
the sill, swayed forward and peeped inside, sending a whiff of delicate
perfume across to where Ann was kneeling, surrounded by trunks and
suitcases, unpacking her belongings. Pleasant little sounds of life floated
up from outdoors--the clucking of a hen, the stamping of the bay cob as
Billy Brewster groomed him, whistling softly through his teeth while he
brushed and curry-combed, the occasional honk of a motor-horn as a car sped
by in the distance. Then came the beat of a horse's hoofs, stopping
abruptly outside the cottage gate.
Ann did not pause in her occupation of emptying a hatbox of its
tissue-shrouded contents. Robin had ridden away almost immediately after
breakfast, so she merely supposed that, having started early, he had
returned early. But a minute later Maria was standing in the doorway of the
room, her broad face red with the exertion of hurrying upstairs, her eyes
blinking excitedly.
"'Tis Mr. Coventry himself, miss," she announced. "He didn't inquire if any
one was at home, but just followed me in and asked me to tell Master Robin
he was here."
Ann rose reluctantly from her knees, dusting her hands together.
"All right, Maria, I'll go down and see him. Perhaps he can leave a message
with me for Robin. I hope, though," she added with a faint sense of
irritation, "that he isn't going to make a habit of dropping in here in the
mornings."
Only pausing to push back a stray lock of hair, she ran quickly downstairs
and into the living-room.
"I'm so sorry"--she began speaking almost as she crossed the
threshold--"but my brother is out."
With a stifled ejaculation the man standing in the shadow of the tall,
old-fashioned chimneypiece wheeled round, and Ann found herself looking
straight into the grey eyes of the Englishman from Montricheux. For a
moment there was a silence--the silence of utter mutual astonishment, while
Ann was wretchedly conscious of the flush that mounted slowly to her very
temples. The man was the first to recover himself.
"So," he said, "_you_ are Miss Lovell!"
Something in his tone stung Ann into composure.
"Yes," she replied coolly. "You don't sound altogether pleased at the
discovery."
"Pleased?" His eyes rested on her with a species of repressed annoyance.
"It doesn't make much difference whether we're--either of us--pleased or
not, does it?"
His meaning appeared perfectly plain to Ann. For some reason which she
could not fathom he found her appearance on the scene the very reverse of
pleasing.
"I don't see that it matters in any case," she replied frostily. "The fact
that I happen to be your agent's sister doesn't compel you to see any more
of me than you wish to."
"True. And if I'd known you were here I wouldn't have come blundering in
this morning."
"I arrived yesterday," vouchsafed Ann. "Won't you sit down?" she added with
perfunctory politeness. She seated herself, and in obedience to her gesture
he mechanically followed suit.
"Yes, you were expected to-day, weren't you? I'd forgotten," he said
abstractedly.
No one particularly enjoys being assured that they have been forgotten, and
Ann's eyes sparkled with suppressed indignation.
"Can I give my brother any message for you?" she asked stiffly.
All at once he smiled--that sudden, singularly sweet smile of his which