Jeannie laughed.
"Once upon a time a man went out fishing for compliments--" she began.
"And he didn"t catch any," said Tom.
"Not one. And now we"ve chattered enough, and you shall tell me all about yourself."
It was a very quiet and simple history that she heard, and all told it amounted to the fact that he had settled down as he told her nearly a year ago he was thinking of doing, but without marrying. There was little to say, and in that little he was characteristically modest. For the greater part of the year he had been down at his place in Wiltshire, of which he had been so studiously absentee a landlord, and for the first time had taken his place as a big landowner, and that which, with rather a wry face, he alluded to as a "county magnate."
It was from other sources that Jeannie knew how modest this account was, and at the end--
"Tom, you"re a brick!" she said.
He laughed.
"Didn"t know it," he said. "But the man who went fishing caught something after all, in that case."
Daisy came into her aunt"s room when the women went upstairs that night for a talk. She was radiantly in love, but it was a different Daisy from her who had made so many plans and known her own mind so well a year ago.
"I know Willie has a cold," she said, "but men are so tiresome. They won"t take reasonable care of themselves. Don"t you think he looked rather run down, Aunt Jeannie?"
"Not the very slightest, I am afraid."
"How horrid of you! Oh, Aunt Jeannie, what a nice world!"
Daisy settled herself on the floor by her aunt"s chair, and possessed herself of her hand.
"And to think that till less than a year ago I was quite, quite blind,"
she said. "I always loved you, I think, but I am so different now. What has happened, do you think?"
"I think you have grown up, my dear," said Jeannie.
"I suppose it may be that. I wonder how it happens. Do you think one grows up from inside, or does something come from outside to make one?"
"Surely it is a combination of the two. It is with us as it is with plants. From outside comes the rain and the sun, which make them grow, but all the same it is from within that this growth comes, so that they put forth leaves and flowers."
Daisy sighed.
"What a lot of time I wasted," she said. "To think that Willie was waiting so long before I could see him as he was. Yes, I know what the sun and the rain were in my case. They were you, you darling, when for my sake and poor Diana"s you did what you did."
"Ah, my dear," said Jeannie, "we need not speak of that."
"But I want to just once--just to tell you that it was you who opened my eyes. And it wasn"t my eyes alone you opened. It was his too--Tom"s, I mean. He knows that, and he told me so."
"That is quite enough about me," said Jeannie, with decision. "Daisy, I wish Tom would marry. Can"t we find some nice girl for him?"
"Oh, we can find a hundred nice girls for him," said Daisy, "and he will respectfully reject them all. He doesn"t want any nice girl. Oh, Aunt Jeannie, why shouldn"t I say it? He"s in love with you. I think he always will be. Some people might call it sad, but I don"t think it is at all. The thought of you makes him so tremendously happy."
Daisy plaited Jeannie"s long white fingers in with her own.
"I think it"s one of the nicest things that ever happened," she said.
"It"s like some old legend of a man who has--well, racketed about all his life, and then suddenly finds his ideal, which, though she is quite out of reach, entirely satisfies him. He is so fond of Uncle Victor too.
That"s so nice of him, and so natural, since Uncle Victor is your husband. It"s just what the man in the legend would do."
Jeannie gave a long, happy sigh.
"Oh, I thank Heaven for my friends," she said.
"They thank Heaven for you," said Daisy softly.
April continued to behave with incredible amiability, and superb and sunny weather blessed Lady Nottingham"s rash experiment. Everywhere the spring triumphed; on the chestnut trees below which Jeannie and Lord Lindfield had sat on the afternoon of the thunderstorm last year a million glutinous buds swelled and burst into delicate five-fingered hands of milky green; and on the beech-trunks was spread the soft green powder of minute mosses. The new gra.s.s of the year was shooting up between the older spikes, making a soft and short-piled velvet, on which the clumps of yellow crocuses broke like the dancing reflection of sun on water. Daffodils danced, too, in shady places, a company of nymphs, and the celandines were like the burnished gold of some illuminated ma.n.u.script of spring.
And all these tokens of the renewed and triumphant life of the world were but the setting to that company of happy hearts a.s.sembled by the Thames" side. The time of the singing bird had come, and their hearts were in tune with it.
The little party, so it had been originally planned, were to disperse on the Wednesday after Easter, but on the Tuesday various secret conferences were held, and with much formality a round-robin was signed and presented to Lady Nottingham, stating that her guests were so much pleased with their quarters that they unanimously wished to stop an extra day.
So they stopped an extra day, another day of burgeoning spring, and were very content. Tom was content also next morning, for he went with Jeannie to her home.
THE END.
ESTABLISHED 1798
[Ill.u.s.tration]
T. NELSON AND SONS
PRINTERS AND PUBLISHERS
Notes on Nelson"s New Novels.
_No work of unwholesome character or of second-rate quality will be included in this Series._