Milly was smiling, really with her own soft gaiety; the flush had gone. Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, for a moment, that her friend would think too much sacrifice to it.
"Of course, dearest, of course we will put it off," she said. "And of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer. It is sweet of you to have thought of it."
Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming quite a virtuous woman," she said. "And it is a pity to miss the primroses."
The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, Christina saw to all, while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton only a day or two before Dick's arrival.
The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.
Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head shining among the young greys and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety. "Isn't the country delicious?" she said to Christina. "Much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, isn't it?"
"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.
"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the cuckoo, Christina, isn't it a sound that makes one think of tears and happiness!"
Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret--regret for something gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo's cry pierced her all day long.
Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.
Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, Dick," she said. And she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new; but then it was only part of Milly's revival; and then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.