Afloat on finance, Ted's conscious virtue overflowed like a cold douche on Ned's patience, which had almost succumbed under explanations that, after all, he "was getting along, but that it was safer--especially with expenses ahead--to have a wide margin," when Aura reappeared. She was wearing the white coat and skirt, the brown Tam-o'-Shanter in which she had gone to Plas Afon. Ned used often to say that in his last incarnation he must either have been a woman or a man milliner; now he recognised without effort, that not only had Aura knotted the Mechlin scarf about her neck but that she also carried the sables over her arm. So she also remembered.
The fact decided him in an instant. "Let me take those," he said coolly. She looked conscious as she gave up the furs, and remarked hurriedly, "We can walk there, Ted; but we might return by the five-thirty train from Elsham."
"Then I'll wire for the motor to meet me there," replied Ned. "It is only six miles to New Park and there is no object in my going round by Blackborough again; besides there is always a wait at the junction."
It seemed to him an interminable time before they left the lingering outskirts of the town behind them, and even when the last bow-window and gable tailed down into the original four-square cottage, the country about was still grime-clad, smut-bound. But Aura did not appear to notice it. In her eyes sat eternal hope, eternal spring, which finds the old world good.
Even when they sat finally on the sand-set bit of common, interspersed with straggly heath and unkempt gorse which was all the nature that Chorley Hill boasted, she did not seem to see the copious orange peel, the screws of sandwich paper which, to Ned's fastidiousness made the place horrible. Her eyes were on the distances where the Welsh hills showed blue.
"How I would love to see Cwmfaernog again!" she said suddenly, "you know, of course, the poor place had to be sold. Ted very nearly had to pay----"
Lord Blackborough cut short her repetition. "But he didn't," he remarked, "for I bought it."
"You bought it," she echoed incredulously; "Ted never told me that." She glanced to her husband, who, flat on the sand with his hat over his eyes, was apparently asleep in the sunshine. The attitude discovered the fact that six months of happy married life--and, no doubt, Aura's cooking--had made him perceptibly larger in the waist. He was evidently following Mr. Hirsch's example, thought Ned; though he might, like other folk, have grown leaner upon grief; for Ned, happily, had not lost the faculty of mocking at his own troubles.