Something stirred in the heart of Robinette as she looked, that part of her blood which her English mother had given her. This scene, so indescribably English as hardly to be imaginable in another land, had been painted for her again and again by her mother with all the retrospective romance of an exile's touch. She knew it, but she did not know if she could ever love it, beautiful though it was and noble.
But she banished these misgivings and ran down the twisted stairway so fast that she was almost panting when she reached the drawing-room door.
"I will take your arm, please," said the hostess coldly, while Miss Smeardon wore the virtuous and injured air of one who has been kept waiting. Mrs. de Tracy laid, on the warm and smooth arm of her guest, one of her small, dry hands, sparkling with rings, and the procession closed with the companion and the lap-dog.
In the dining room, the shutters were closed, and the candles, in branching candlesticks of silver, only partially lit a room long and low like the other. The walls were darkened with pictures, and Robinette's bright eyes searched them eagerly.
"The Sir Joshua is not here!" she thought. "And it was not in the drawing room. Has Aunt de Tracy given, or hidden it away--my very own name-picture?"
With all her determination, Robinette somehow could not summon courage enough to ask where this picture was. Such a question would involve the mention of her mother's name, and from that she shrank. Young Mrs. Loring had never before found herself in a society where conversation was apparently regarded as a crime, and to fit herself to her environment, under the scrutiny of Mrs. de Tracy and the decidedly inimical looks of the companion, took all her time. A burden of self-consciousness lay upon her such as her light and elastic spirit had never known. She found herself morbidly observant of minute details; the pattern of the tablecloth; the crest upon the spoons; the curious red knobs upon Miss Smeardon's fingers, and the odd mincing way she held her fork; the almost athletic efforts of the butler when he raised an enormous silver dish-cover, and the curiously frugal and unappetizing nature of the viand it disclosed. The wizened face of the lap-dog, too, peering over the table's edge, out of Miss Smeardon's lap, might have acquired its distrustful expression, Robinette thought, from habitual doubts as to whether enough to eat would ever be his good fortune. The meal ended with the ceremonious presentation to each lady in turn, of three wrinkled apples and two crooked bananas in a probably priceless dish of Crown Derby. Then the procession re-formed and returned to the drawing room.