A little teased, a little flattered by her queries on the subject, Clandonald yet felt assured that her interest was impersonal and genuine. When he remembered how Ruby had hated to stay at Beaumanoir, preferring any small stuffy hotel in Paris or Rome, or on the Riviera, Miss Winstanley’s real enthusiasm was refreshing. It almost made him want to go back himself to that spot, haunted by the ghosts of dead beliefs, near which the poor little boy slept, under a tiny mound in the churchyard that he was always trying to forget.
Strange, now it always came to him when alone in a balmy wood, with birds singing and sun filtering through the branches; or on Sundays when a church bell rang; or if he awoke suddenly in the middle of the night; or in looking at a field of haymakers and distant grazing sheep! It was not a keen pain any longer, but only a sobering, tender thought, and the man was better for it afterward. Now, again, as he thrust his hands deeper in his pockets and strode up and down beside the girl, dodging other walking pairs, and wishing there were not so many people in the world who wanted to do what he did, the image of the little green mound arose across the waste of wide Atlantic. Was it Posey who inspired his one sacred remembrance? He could not tell, but went on letting her draw him out about his lovely impoverished Beaumanoir, until she was touched and astonished at the feeling he revealed concerning it.
"Oh! I am sure you will have it all once more, and be able to enjoy everything as of old," she exclaimed impulsively.
"Perhaps you don’t know why this is impossible," he answered, gulping down the bitter fact, "It is quite hopeless for me to live decently there, on all I am ever likely to have in the way of income."
"And I, like a goose, keep always ignoring the money question in connection with those beautiful entrancing old English places. I’ve read about them so often in a book we have of ’Dwellings of the Aristocracy and Gentry,’ and also in ’Country Life.’ They seem to have been created to go on for ages by themselves, in a state of suspended animation, like the Sleeping Beauty’s palace. If you won’t think me silly, I’ll tell you that when I get hold of a copy of ’Country Life,’ I imagine myself living in one house after another of the illustrations, and I want to buy all the horses and dogs and sheep and everything in the advertisements, except, maybe, incubators, which are horrid unnatural things, and the smelly stuff they put upon the grass and flowers that can’t say ’don’t’!"