IV

In the tiny cornfields the reapers rose from their work to watch the carriage.  Mr. Barton commented on the disturbed state of the country.  Olive asked if Mr. Parnell was good-looking.  A railway-bridge was passed and a pine-wood aglow with the sunset, and a footman stepped down from the box to open a swinging iron gate.

This was Brookfield.  Sheep grazed on the lawn, at the end of which, beneath some chestnut-trees, was the house.  It had been built by the late Mr. Barton out of a farmhouse, but the present man, having travelled in Italy and been attracted by the picturesque, had built a verandah; and for the same reason had insisted on calling his daughter Olive.

‘Oh there, mamma!’ cried Olive, looking out of the carriage window; and the two girls watched their mother, a pretty woman of forty, coming across the greensward to meet them.

She moved over the greensward in a skirt that seemed a little too long—­a black silk skirt trimmed with jet.  As she came forward her daughters noticed that their mother dyed her hair in places where it might be suspected of turning grey.  It was parted in the middle and she wore it drawn back over her ears and slightly puffed on either side in accordance with the fashion that had come in with the Empress Eugenie.  Even in a photograph she was like a last-century beauty sketched by Romney in pastel—­brown, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a thin figure a little bent.  Even in youth it had probably resembled Alice’s rather than Olive’s, but neither had inherited her mother’s hands—­the most beautiful hands ever seen—­and while they trifled with the newly bought foulards a warbling voice inquired if Olive was sure she was not tired.

’Five hours in the train!  And you, Alice?  You must be starving, my dear, and I’m afraid the saffron buns are cold.  Milord brought us over such a large packet to-day.  We must have some heated up.  They won’t be a minute.’

‘Oh, mamma, I assure you I am not in the least hungry!’ cried Olive.

’La beaute n’a jamais faim, elle se nourrit d’elle meme,’ replied Lord Dungory, who had just returned from the pleasure-ground whither he had gone for a little walk with Arthur.

’You will find Milord the same as ever—­toujours galant; always thinking of la beaute, et les femmes.’

Lord Dungory was the kind of man that is often seen with the Mrs. Barton type of woman.  An elderly beau verging on the sixties, who, like Mrs. Barton, suggested a period.  His period was very early Victorian, but he no longer wore a silk hat in the country.  A high silk hat in Galway would have called attention to his age, so the difficulty of costume was ingeniously compromised by a tall felt, a cross between a pot and a chimney-pot.  For collars, a balance had been struck between the jaw-scrapers of old time and the nearest modern equivalent; and in the tying of the large cravat there was a reminiscence, but nothing more, of the past generation.