In descending the staircase on his way to the drawing-room before dinner, Sir Nigel glanced about him with interested curiosity.  If the village had been put in order, something more had been done here.  Remembering the worn rugs and the bald-headed tiger, he lifted his brows.  To leave one’s house in a state of resigned dilapidation and return to find it filled with all such things as comfort combined with excellent taste might demand, was an enlivening experience—­or would have been so under some circumstances.  As matters stood, perhaps, he might have felt better pleased if things had been less well done.  But they were very well done.  They had managed to put themselves in the right in this also.  The rich sobriety of colour and form left no opening for supercilious comment—­which was a neat weapon it was annoying to be robbed of.

The drawing-room was fresh, brightly charming, and full of flowers.  Betty was standing before an open window with her sister.  His wife’s shoulders, he observed at once, had absolutely begun to suggest contours.  At all events, her bones no longer stuck out.  But one did not look at one’s wife’s shoulders when one could turn from them to a fairness of velvet and ivory.  “You know,” he said, approaching them, “I find all this very amazing.  I have been looking out of my window on to the gardens.”

“It is Betty who has done it all,” said Rosy.

“I did not suspect you of doing it, my dear Rosalie,” smiling.  “When I saw Betty standing in the avenue, I knew at once that it was she who had mended the chimney-pots in the village and rehung the gates.”

For the present, at least, it was evident that he meant to be sufficiently amiable.  At the dinner table he was conversational and asked many questions, professing a natural interest in what had been done.  It was not difficult to talk to a girl whose eyes and shoulders combined themselves with a quick wit and a power to attract which he reluctantly owned he had never seen equalled.  His reluctance arose from the fact that such a power complicated matters.  He must be on the defensive until he knew what she was going to do, what he must do himself, and what results were probable or possible.  He had spent his life in intrigue of one order or another.  He enjoyed outwitting people and rather preferred to attain an end by devious paths.  He began every acquaintance on the defensive.  His argument was that you never knew how things would turn out, consequently, it was as well to conduct one’s self at the outset with the discreet forethought of a man in the presence of an enemy.  He did not know how things would turn out in Betty’s case, and it was a little confusing to find one’s self watching her with a sense of excitement.  He would have preferred to be cool—­to be cold—­and he realised that he could not keep his eyes off her.

“I remember, with regret,” he said to her later in the evening, “that when you were a child we were enemies.”