But, notwithstanding her indignant determination to throw herself back into the bosom of her own class, it was to Roger alone that she made any overtures of further intercourse. He stayed behind all the others when the troops of guests went away, and told her it was a real plucky thing to do, and had been a first-rate success. He looked, indeed, like a gentleman, but he had not adopted the phraseology of the Vere de Veres; and perhaps Patty liked him all the better. She said, “Come and see me any day; come when you like,” when he held her hand to say good-night; and she said it in an undertone, so that Aunt Patience might not hear.
“I will indeed,” he said in the same tone, “the first vacant day I have----” Her breast swelled to see that he was a man much sought after, though this had not been her own fate.
But either he did not have a vacant day, or, what Patty’s judgment quite approved, he did not mean to make himself cheap. And Patty fell into a worse depth of solitude than ever, notwithstanding the presence of Aunt Patience, to whom she had said in the rashness of her passion that she should henceforth stay always at Greyshott, but whom now she felt to be an additional burden when perpetually by her side. There had been a little quarrel between them after luncheon one day in July, for they were both irritable by reason of that unbroken _tête-à-tête_, and of the fact that they had said ten or twelve times over everything they had to say; and Miss Hewitt had flounced off upstairs to her room, where, after her passion blew off, she had lain down on the sofa to take a nap, leaving Patty to unmitigated solitude. It was raining, and that made it more dreary than ever: rain in July, quiet, persistent, downpouring; bursting the flowers to pieces; scattering the leaves of the last roses on the ground; and injuring even those sturdy uninteresting geraniums which are the gardener’s stand-by--is the dreariest of all rains. It is out of season, even when it is wanted for the country, as there is always some philosopher to tell us; and it is pitiless, pattering upon the trees, soaking the grass, spreading about us a remorseless curtain of grey. Patty, all alone, walked from window to window and saw nothing but the trees under the rain, and a little yellow river pouring across the path. She sat down and took up the work with which Aunt Patience solaced the weary hours. It was the old-fashioned Berlin woolwork, which only old ladies do nowadays. She contrived to put it all wrong, and then she threw it down and went to the window again. And then she was aware of a figure coming up the avenue, a figure clothed in a glistening white mackintosh and under an umbrella. She could not see who it was, but something in the walk struck her as familiar. It looked like a gentleman, she said to herself; though to be sure, in these days of equality, it might be only the draper’s young man with patterns, or the lawyer’s clerk. Patty felt that she would have been glad to see even the lawyer’s clerk.