She went back to the house, bowed down by shame and confusion, and marched straight to the dowager's morning-room.
'Look what the terriers have done to me, grandmother,' she said, with a sob. 'It is all my own fault, of course. I ought not to have gone near them in that stupid muslin. Please forgive me for being so foolish. I am not fit to have pretty frocks.'
'I think, my dear, you can now have no doubt that the tailor gowns are fittest for you,' answered Lady Maulevrier, with crushing placidity. 'We have tried the experiment of dressing you like Lesbia, and you see it does not answer. Tell Kibble to throw your new gown in the rag-bag, and please let me hear no more about it.'
After this dismal failure Mary could not feel herself ill-used in having to wear tailor gowns all the year round. She was allowed cotton frocks for very warm weather, and she had pretty gowns for evening wear; but her usual attire was cloth or linsey woolsey, made by the local tailor. Sometimes Maulevrier ordered her a gown or a coat from his own man in Conduit Street, and then she felt herself smart and fashionable. And even the local tailor contrived to make her gowns prettily, having a great appreciation of her straight willowy figure, and deeming it a privilege to work for her, so that hitherto Mary had felt very well content with her cloth and linsey. But now that John Hammond so obviously admired Lesbia's delicate raiment, poor Mary began to think her woollen gowns odious.
After breakfast Mary and Maulevrier went straight off to the kennels. His lordship had numerous instructions to give on this last day, and his lieutenant had to receive and register his orders. Lesbia went to the garden with her book and with Fräulein--the inevitable Fräulein as Hammond thought her--in close attendance.
It was a lovely morning, sultry, summer-like, albeit September had just begun. The tennis lawn, which had been levelled on one side of the house, was surrounded on three sides by shrubberies planted forty years ago, in the beginning of Lady Maulevrier's widowhood. All loveliest trees grew there in perfection, sheltered by the mighty wall of the mountain, fed by the mists from the lake. Larch and mountain ash, and Lawsonian cyprus,--deodara and magnolia, arbutus, and silver broom, acacia and lilac, flourished here in that rich beauty which made every cottage garden in the happy district a little paradise; and here in a semi-circular recess at one end of the lawn were rustic chairs and tables and an umbrella tent. This was Lady Lesbia's chosen retreat on summer mornings, and a favourite place for afternoon tea.