"And paid the fine out of my own pocket--don't forget that!" Sir Richard chuckled. "Well, Dr. Anstice, if you're not in a hurry, walk round with us, will you? You aren't busy on a Sunday afternoon, I suppose?"
"Well, not very." In spite of himself Anstice felt a strange reluctance to part from his new friends. "I was going for a walk, as you see, and if I may come with you----"
So it fell out that for the first Sunday since he had arrived in Littlefield Anstice's walk was no solitary stroll, companioned only by his own moody or rebellious thoughts, but a pleasant interlude in a life which in spite of incessant and often engrossing work, was on the whole a joyless one.
This afternoon Iris Wayne looked little more than a schoolgirl in her short skirt and brightly coloured jersey, a cap pulled well down over her curls, which nevertheless rioted over her forehead in entrancing confusion. It was very evident that she and her father were on the best of terms; and if, as seemed probable, Sir Richard was proud of his pretty daughter, it was no less certain that she, on her side, thought her father the most wonderful of men.
The trio chatted pleasantly as they crossed the sunny golf links, and Sir Richard told himself that his impressions of this man, gathered from hasty visions of him about the village, or from the chatter of the countryside, impressions which had labelled him as a morose, sullen kind of fellow, had certainly been fallacious.
Reserved he might be; but although his manner was quiet and his smile a trifle sad, there was nothing morose about him to-day; and if his conversation was not particularly brilliant Sir Richard thought none the worse of him for that.
So pleased, indeed, was he with his new acquaintance that when they reached the Club House on the return journey he pressed the young man to accompany them home for a cup of tea.
"I'm sure your patients must cease from troubling on a Sunday afternoon at any rate," he said genially, "and you haven't anyone waiting for you at home, have you?"
With a rather melancholy smile Anstice admitted that there was no one waiting for him at home; and since Iris seconded her father's invitation with a kind little entreaty on her own account, he accepted their joint hospitality without further demur.
Greengates, the home of the Waynes, was a stately old house, more dignified, though perhaps less charming, than the fascinating Cherry Orchard; but its very dignity gave charm; and it formed a by no means incongruous background for this youngest and prettiest of its daughters. For all her youth and high spirits, Iris seemed to fit into the place as one born to it; and when she tossed aside her cap and sat down behind the massive silver tea-tray, her gold-brown curls shone against the oak panelling of the walls as the wild daffodils gleam golden against the massive brown trunks of the trees in whose shade they grow.