That was the side of Roger which she liked best to dwell upon. But she was rapidly learning that he had other less heroically attractive sides. No man who has been consistently spoiled and made much of by a couple of women is likely to escape developing a certain amount of selfishness, and Nan had already discovered that Roger was somewhat inclined to play the autocrat. As he grew accustomed to her presence in the house he settled down more or less tranquilly into the normal ways of existence, and sometimes, when things went awry, he would lose his temper pretty badly, as is the natural way of man.

Unfortunately, Nan's honest endeavours to get on better terms with her future mother-in-law met with no success. Lady Gertrude had presented an imperturbably polite and hostile front almost from the moment of the girl's arrival at the Hall. Even at dinner the first evening, she had cast a disapproving eye upon Nan's frock--a diaphanous little garment in black: with veiled gleams of hyacinth and gold beneath the surface and apparently sustained about its wearer by a thread of the same glistening hyacinth and gold across each slender shoulder.

With the quickness of a squirrel Isobel Carson, demurely garbed as befitted a poor relative, noted the disapprobation conveyed by Lady Gertrude's sweeping glance.

"I suppose that's what they're wearing now in town?" she asked conversationally of Nan across the table.

Roger looked up and seeing the young, privet-white throat and shoulders which gleamed above the black, smiled contentedly.

"It's jolly pretty, isn't it?" he rejoined, innocently unaware that any intention lurked behind his cousin's query.

"It might be--if there were more of it," said Lady Gertrude icily. She had not failed to notice earlier that Nan was wearing the abbreviated skirt of the moment--though in no way an exaggerated form of it--revealing delectable shoes and cobwebby stockings which seemed to cry out a gay defiance to the plain and serviceable footgear which she herself affected.

"It does look just a tiny bit daring--in the country," murmured Isobel deprecatingly. "You see, we're used to such quiet fashions here."

"I don't think anything can be much quieter than black," replied Nan evenly.

There for the moment the matter rested, but the next day Roger had asked her, rather diffidently, if she couldn't find something plainer to wear in an evening.

"I thought you liked the dress," she countered.

"Well--yes. But--"

"But your mother has been talking t0 you about it? Is that it?"

Roger nodded.

"Even Isobel thought it a little outre for country wear," he said eagerly, making matters worse instead of better, in the blundering way a man generally contrives to do when he tries to settle a feminine difference of opinion.

Nan's foot tapped the floor impatiently and a spark of anger lit itself in her eyes.

"I don't think my choice of clothes has anything to do with Miss Carson," she answered sharply.

"No, sweetheart, of course it hasn't, really. But I know you'd like to please my mother--and she's not used to these new styles, you see."

He stumbled on awkwardly, then drew her into his arms and kissed her.

"To please me--wear something else," he said. Although unformulated even to himself, Roger's creed was of the old school. He quite honestly believed that a woman's chief object in life was to please her male belongings, and it seemed to him a perfectly good arrangement.

Not to please him, but because she was genuinely anxious to win Lady Gertrude's liking, Nan yielded. Perhaps if she conceded this particular point it would pave the way towards a better understanding.

"Very well," she said, smiling. "That especial frock shan't appear again while I'm down here. But it's a duck of a frock, really, Roger!"--with a feminine sigh of regret.

She was to find, however, as time went on, that there were very many other points over which she would have to accept Lady Gertrude's rulings. Punctuality at meals was regarded at Trenby Hall as one of the laws of the Medes and Persians, and Nan, accustomed to the liberty generally accorded a musician in such matters, failed on more than one occasion to appear at lunch with the promptness expected of her.

In the West Parlour---a sitting-room which Lady Gertrude herself never used--there was a fairly good piano, and here Nan frequently found refuge, playing her heart out in the welcome solitude the room afforded. Inevitably she would forget the time, remaining entirely oblivious of such mundane things as meals. Then she would be sharply recalled to the fact that she had committed an unforgivable sin by receiving a stately message from Lady Gertrude to the effect that they were waiting lunch for her.

On such occasions Nan sometimes felt that it was almost a physical impossibility to enter that formal dining-room and face the glacial disapproval manifest on Lady Gertrude's face, the quick glance of condolence which Isobel would throw her--and which always somehow filled her with distrust--and the irritability which Roger was scarcely able to conceal.

Roger's annoyance was generally due to the veiled criticism which his mother and cousin contrived to exude prior to her appearance. Nothing definite--an intonation here, a double-edged phrase there--but enough to show him that his future wife fell far short of the standard Lady Gertrude had in mind for her. It nettled him, and accordingly he felt irritated with Nan for giving his mother a fresh opportunity for disapprobation.

They were all unimportant things--these small jars and clashes of habit and opinion. But to Nan, who had been used to such absolute freedom, they were like so many links of a chain which held and chafed her. She fretted under them as a caged bird frets. Gradually, too, she was awakening to the limitations of the life which would be hers when she married Roger, realising that, much as he loved her, he was quite unable to supply her with either the kind of companionship or the mental stimulus her temperament craved and which the little coterie of clever, brilliant people who had been her intimates in town had given her in full measure. The Trenbys' circle of friends interested her not at all. The men mostly of the st.u.r.dy, sporting type, bored her ineffably, and she found the women, with their perpetual local gossip and discussion of domestic difficulties, dull and uninspiring. Of the McBains, unfortunately, she saw very little, owing to the distance, between the Hall and Trevarthen Wood.

It was, therefore, with a cry of delight that she welcomed Sandy, who arrived in his two-seater shortly after Roger had ridden off to the meet. Lady Gertrude and Isobel had already gone out together, bent upon some parochial errand in the village, so that Nan was alone with her thoughts. And they were not particularly pleasant ones.

"Sandy!" She greeted him with outstretched hands. "You angel boy! I wasn't even hoping to see you for another few weeks or so."

"Just this minute arrived--thought it about time I looked you up again," returned Sandy cheerfully. "I met Trenby about a mile away and scattered his horses and hounds to the four winds of heaven with my stink-pot."

"Yes," agreed Nan reminiscently. "Why does your car smell so atrociously, Sandy?"

"It's only in slow movements--never in a presto. That's why I'm always getting held up for exceeding the speed limit. I'm bound to let her rip--out of consideration to the pa.s.sersby."

"Well, I'm awfully glad you felt moved to come over here this morning.

I'm--I'm rather fractious to-day, I think. Do you suppose Lady Gertrude will ask you to stay to lunch?"

"I hope so. But as it's only about ten-thirty a.m., lunch is merely a futurist dream at present."

"I know. I wonder why there are such enormous intervals between meals in the country?" said Nan speculatively. "In town there's never any time to get things in and meals are a perfect nuisance. Here they seem to be the only breaks in the day."

"That," replied Sandy sententiously, "is because you're leading an idle existence. You're not doing anything--so of course there's no time to do it in."

"Not doing anything? Well, what is there to do?" She flung out her hands with an odd little gesture of hopelessness. "Besides, I am doing something--I learned how to make puddings yesterday, and to-morrow I'm to be initiated into soup jellies--you know, the kind of stuff you trot around to old women in the village at Christmas time."

"Can't the cook make them?"

"Of course she can. But Lady Gertrude is appalled at my lack of domestic knowledge--so soup jellies it has to be."

Sandy regarded her thoughtfully. She seemed spiritless, and the charming face held a gravity that was quite foreign to it. In the searching winter sunlight he could even discern one or two faint lines about the violet-blue eyes, while the curving mouth, with its provocative short upper lip, drooped rather wearily at its corners.

"You're bored stiff," he told her firmly. "Why don't you run up to town for a few days and see your pals there?"

Nan shrugged her shoulders.

"For the excellent reason that half of them are away, or--or married or something."

Only a few days previously she had seen the announcement of Maryon Rooke's marriage in the papers, and although the fact that he was married had now no power to wound her, it was like the snapping of yet another link with that happy, irresponsible, Bohemian life which she and Penelope had shared together.

"Sandy"--she spoke impetuously. "After I'm--married, I don't think I shall ever go to London again. It would be like peeping into heaven.

Then the door would slam and I'd come back--here! I'm out of it now--out of everything. The others will all go on singing and playing and making books and pictures--right in the heart of it all. While I shall be stuck away here . . . by myself . . . making soup jellies!"

She sprang up and walked restlessly to the window, staring out at the undulating meadowland.

"I'm sick of the sight of those fields!" she exclaimed almost violently. "The same deadly dull green fields day after day. If--if one of them would only turn pink for a change it would be a relief!"

Her breath caught in a strangled sob.

Sandy followed her to the window.

"Look here, Nan, you can't go on like this." There was an unaccustomed decision in his tones; the boyish inflection had gone. It was a man who was speaking, and determinedly, too. "You've no business to be everlastingly gazing at green fields. You ought to be turning 'em into music so that the people who've got only bricks and mortar to stare at can get a whiff of them."