that--I must have been away."
They were both glad to have glided on to a safe, indifferent subject.
"I'll go back to my carnations now, but first I'd better tell your father
the news."
"You--you--needn't remind father of anything that happened years ago,
Janet--need you?"
Janet Tosswill shook her head, and yet when she had shut the door
behind her in her husband's study, almost the first words she uttered,
after having told him of Godfrey Radmore's coming visit, were:--"I
shall never, never forgive him for the way he treated Betty. I hate the
thought of having to be nice to him--I wish Timmy wasn't his godson!"
She spoke the words breathlessly, defiantly, standing before her old
John's untidy writing table.
As she spoke, he rather nervously turned some papers over under his
hand:--"I don't know that he behaved as badly as you think, my dear.
Neither of them had any money, and at that time he had no prospects."
"He'd thrown away his prospects! Then I can't forgive him for his
behaviour last year--never coming down to see us, I mean. It was so--so
ungrateful! Handsome presents don't make up for that sort of thing. I
used to long to send the things back."
"I don't think you're fair," began Mr. Tosswill deprecatingly. "He did
write me a very nice letter, Janet, explaining that it was impossible for
him to come."
"Well, I suppose we must make the best of it--particularly as he says
that he's come back to England for good."
She went out of the room, and so into the garden--back to the border
she had left unwillingly but at which she now glanced down with a
sensation of disgust. She felt thoroughly ruffled and upset--a very
unusual condition for her to be in, for Janet Tosswill was an equable
and happy-natured woman, for all her affectionate and sensitive heart.
She told herself that it was true the whole world had altered in the last
nine years--everything had altered except Beechfield. The little Surrey
village seemed to her mind exactly the same as it was when she had
come there, as a bride, fourteen years ago, except that almost
everybody in it, from being comfortably off, had become
uncomfortably poor. Then all at once, she smiled. The garden of Old
Place was very different from the garden she had found when she first
came there. It had been a melancholy, neglected, singularly ugly
garden--the kind of garden which only costly bedding-out had made
tolerable in some prosperous early Victorian day. Now it was noted for
its charm and beauty even among the many beautiful gardens of the
neighbourhood, and during the War she had made quite a lot of money
selling flowers and fruit for the local Red Cross. Now she was trying to
coax her husband to take one of the glebe fields on a long lease in order
to start a hamper trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers. Dolly, the one
of her three step-daughters whom she liked least, was fond of
gardening, in a dull plodding way, and might be trained to such work.
But try though she did to forget Godfrey Radmore, her mind swung
ceaselessly back to the man with whom she had just had that curious
talk on the telephone. She was sorry--not glad as a more worldly
woman would have been--that Godfrey Radmore was coming back into
their life.
CHAPTER II
While Janet Tosswill was thinking so intently of Godfrey Radmore, he
himself was standing at the window of a big bedroom in one of those
musty, expensive, old-fashioned hotels, which, perhaps because they
are within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, still have faithful patrons all
the year round, and are full to bursting during the London Season. As
to Radmore, he had chosen it because it was the place where the
grandfather who had brought him up always stayed when he, Godfrey,
was a little boy.
Tall, well-built after the loose-limbed English fashion, and with a dark,
intelligent, rather grim cast of face, Radmore looked older than his age,
which was thirty-two. Yet, for all that, there was an air of power and of
reserved strength about him that set him apart from his fellows, and a
casual observer would have believed him cold, and perhaps a thought
calculating, in nature.
Yet, standing there, looking out on that quiet, narrow street, he was
seething with varying emotions in which he was, in a sense, luxuriating,
though whether he would have admitted any living being to a share in
them was another matter.
Home! Home at last for good!--after what had been, with two short
breaks, a nine years' absence from England, and from all that England
stands for to such a man.
He had left his country in 1910, an angry,
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