With the perfect curve of a great supple animal, she turned and settled
in her lair, under her tree.
Presently, down the steps and across the lawn, Anne's father came
towards her, grave, handsome, and alone.
Handsome even after fifteen years of India. Handsomer than when he was
young. More distinguished. Eyes lighter in the sallowish bronze. She
liked his lean, eager, deerhound's face, ready to start off, sniffing
the trail. A little strained, leashed now, John's eagerness. But that
was how he used to come to her, with that look of being ready, as if
they could do things together.
She had tried to find his youth in Anne's face; but Anne's blackness and
whiteness were her mother's; her little nose was still soft and vague;
you couldn't tell what she would be like in five years' time. Still,
there was something; the same strange quality; the same
forward-springing grace.
Before he reached her, Adeline was smiling again. A smile of the
delicate, instinctive mouth, of the blue eyes shining between curled
lids, under dark eyebrows; of the innocent white nose; of the whole
soft, milk-white face. Even her sleek, dark hair smiled, shining. She
was conscious of her power to make him come to her, to make herself felt
through everything, even through his bereavement.
The subtle Eliot, looking over the terrace wall, observed her and
thought, "The mater's jolly pleased with herself. I wonder why."
It struck Eliot also that a Commissioner of Ambala and a Member of the
Legislative Council and a widower ought not to look like Mr. Severn. He
was too lively, too adventurous.
He turned again to the enthralling page. "The student should lay open
the theoracic cavity of the rabbit and dissect away the thymous gland
and other tissues which hide the origin of the great vessels; so as to
display the heart..."
Yearp, the vet, would show him how to do that.
iv "His name's Benjy. He's a butterfly smut," said Jerrold.
The rabbit was quiet now. He sat in Anne's arms, couching, his forepaws
laid on her breast. She stooped and kissed his soft nose that went in
and out, pushing against her mouth, in a delicate palpitation. He was
white, with black ears and a black oval at the root of his tail. Two
wing-shaped patches went up from his nose like a moustache. That was his
butterfly smut.
"He _is_ sweet," she said.
Colin said it after her in his shrill child's voice: "He is sweet."
Colin had a habit of repeating what you said. It was his way of joining
in the conversation.