erred him with
nice accuracy from what I already knew of him. Mrs. Banks was a surprise.
I had pictured her as tall and slight, and inclined to be sombre. Anne's
hints of the romantic side of her mother's temperament had, for some
reason, suggested that image to me, and I was quite absurdly dumfounded
for the moment when I saw this little, roundabout, dark-haired
Frenchwoman, as typically exotic as her husband was home-grown, voluble,
brisk despite the handicap of her figure, and with nothing English about
her unless it were her accent.

Fortunately she gave me no time to display the awkwardness of my surprise.
She came straight at me, talking from the instant she entered the door.
"Discussing the crops already?" she said. "You must forgive us, Mr.
Melhuish, for being so interested in the weather. When one's fortune
depends upon it, one naturally thinks of little else." She gave me her
small plump hand with an engaging but, as it were, a breathless smile.
"And you must be starving," she continued rapidly. "Anne tells me you had
no tea at all anywhere, and that the people at the Hall have been treating
you outrageously. So! will you sit there and Anne next to you, and those
two dreadful children who won't be separated, together on the other side."

She was apparently intent only upon this business of getting us into our
places about the supper-table, and not until I had sat down did I realise
that her last sentence had been an announcement intended for her husband.

"What did you say, Nancy?" he asked with a puzzled air. He was still
standing at the head of the table and staring with obvious embarrassment
at his wife.

She waved her hands at him. "Sit down, Alfred," she commanded him, and in
her pronunciation of his name I noticed for the first time the ripple of a
French "r." Possibly her manner of speaking his name was a form of
endearment. "All in good time, you shall hear about it directly. Now, we
are all very hungry and waiting for you." And without the least hint of a
pause she turned to me and glided over an apology for the nature of the
meal. "We call it supper," she said, "and it is just a farm-house supper,
but better in its way, don't you think, than a formal dinner?" She took me
utterly into her confidence with her smile as she added, "Up at the Hall
they make so much ceremony, all about nothing. I am not surprised that you
ran away. But it was very original, all the same." She introduced me to
the first