'
'Dear me! Primrose can read quite well,' said Mysie, somewhat alarmed;
'but then,' she went on in a reassured voice, 'so could all of us
except Jasper and Gillian, and they felt the heat so much at Gibraltar
that they were quite stupid while they were there.'
This discussion brought the two girls across the paddock out into a
road with a broad, neat footpath, where numerous little children were
being exercised with nurses and perambulators. At first it was
bordered by fields on either side, but villas soon began to spring up,
and presently the girls reached what looked like a long, low 'cottage
residence,' but was really two, with a verandah along the front, and a
garden divided in the middle by a paling covered with canary
nasturtium shrubs. The verandah on one side was hung with a rich
purple pall of the dark clematis, on the other by a Gloire de Dijon
rose. There were bright flower beds, and the dormer windows over the
verandah looked like smiling eyes under their deep brows of creeper-
trimmed verge-board. What London-bred Dolores saw was a sight that
shocked her--a lady standing unbonnetted just beyond the verandah,
talking to a girl whose black hat and jacket looked what Mysie called
'very G.F.S.-y.'
The lady did not turn out to be young or beautiful. She was near
middle age, and looked as if she were far too busy to be ever plump;
she had a very considerable amount of nose and rather thin, dark hair,
done in a fashion which, like that of her navy blue linen dress, looked
perfectly antiquated to Dolores.
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