she was!

Holly, followed closely by her elderly French governess, whose digestion
had been ruined twenty-two years ago in the siege of Strasbourg, came
rushing towards them from under the oak tree. She stopped about a dozen
yards away, to pat Balthasar and pretend that this was all she had in her
mind. Old Jolyon, who knew better, said:

"Well, my darling, here's the lady in grey I promised you."

Holly raised herself and looked up. He watched the two of them with a
twinkle, Irene smiling, Holly beginning with grave inquiry, passing into
a shy smile too, and then to something deeper. She had a sense of
beauty, that child--knew what was what! He enjoyed the sight of the kiss
between them.

"Mrs. Heron, Mam'zelle Beauce. Well, Mam'zelle--good sermon?"

For, now that he had not much more time before him, the only part of the
service connected with this world absorbed what interest in church
remained to him. Mam'zelle Beauce stretched out a spidery hand clad in a
black kid glove--she had been in the best families--and the rather sad
eyes of her lean yellowish face seemed to ask: "Are you well-brrred?"
Whenever Holly or Jolly did anything unpleasing to her--a not uncommon
occurrence--she would say to them: "The little Tayleurs never did
that--they were such well-brrred little children." Jolly hated the
little Tayleurs; Holly wondered dreadfully how it was she fell so short
of them. 'A thin rum little soul,' old Jolyon thought her--Mam'zelle
Beauce.

Luncheon was a successful meal, the mushrooms which he himself had picked
in the mushroom house, his chosen strawberries, and another bottle of the
Steinberg cabinet filled him with a certain aromatic spirituality, and a
conviction that he would have a touch of eczema to-morrow.

After lunch they sat under the oak tree drinking Turkish coffee. It was
no matter of grief to him when Mademoiselle Beauce withdrew to write her
Sunday letter to her sister, whose future had been endangered in the past
by swallowing a pin--an event held up daily in warning to the children to
eat slowly and digest what they had eaten. At the foot of the bank, on a
carriage rug, Holly and the dog Balthasar teased and loved each other,
and in the shade old Jolyon with his legs crossed and his cigar
luxuriously savoured, gazed at Irene sitting in the swing. A light,
vaguely swaying, grey figure with a fleck of sunlight here and there upon
it, lips just opened, eyes dark and soft under lids