"You fickle child! And you have always declared you liked my motor better than any car that ever was seen!"
"So I do." Cherry looked up at her with unsmiling gravity. "But----"
"But now you must all come in and have lunch." Mrs. Carstairs turned to Anstice. "Dr. Anstice, you can spare us a little time, can't you? Lunch is quite ready, and Cherry, I'm sure, endorses my invitation!"
He hesitated, torn between a desire to accept and an uncomfortable suspicion that he could not afford the time.
"You will have to lunch somewhere, you know!" Her manner was a trifle warmer than usual. "And it will really save time to do it here!"
"My lunch is a very hurried affair as a rule," he said, smiling. "But if I may run away as soon as I've finished I'll be delighted to stay."
He felt a small hand slip into his as he spoke, and looked down, to meet Cherry's clear eyes.
"Do stay, my dear!" Her tone was a quaint imitation of her mother's, and before the twofold invitation Anstice's scruples were put to flight.
"I'll stay with pleasure," he said, patting the kind little hand; and with an air of satisfaction Cherry led him into the hall, her mother and Miss Wayne following their lead.
Once seated at the pretty round table, sweet with the fragrance of hyacinths in a big Swansea bowl, and bright with silver and glass, Anstice owned inwardly to a feeling of pleasure at his position. Although as a rule he loved his solitude, welcomed the silence of the old panelled house he had taken in Littlefield, and shunned those of his kind who had no direct need of his services, there were times when his self-sought loneliness weighed heavily upon his spirit, when the ghosts of the past, whose shrouded forms were ever present to remind him that he had made a fatal mistake on that bygone morning in India, were but poor company.
At first, during that first haunted year, when Hilda Ryder's face was ever before his eyes, her sad and tender accents in his ear, he had sought many and dubious ways of laying those same ghosts. It had seemed to him, during those dreadful days, that although some instinct within him forbade him to end his own life, none could doubt his right to alleviate his mental suffering by any means he knew; and when temporary oblivion, a blessed forgetfulness, could be purchased at the price of a pinprick, it seemed not only overscrupulous but foolish to forgo that Nirvana.