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78 strawberries and angelica, but corked to all eternity; and he had lunched with Mrs. Majendie on flabby salmon and advanced quail. She had been a guest there, too, and saw how obvious it was that the maidservants were not accustomed to handing dishes that were ordinarily dispensed from the table. But here Aunt Cathie gave him an excellent egg, and Lucia gave him a piece of cold lamb, having made the salad during egg-time, and he helped himself to cheese from the sideboard, and put his cherry-stones on to his other plate. It was all simple and calculated, instead of being pompous and unusual. How pompous and unusual, also, had been the conversation at those other depressing banquets! Mrs. Wilson had clung to the Court Circular as to a lifebuoy, and had shown an amazing knowledge of the movements of the Royal Family; Mrs. Vereker had at her fingers' ends the names of those who might be found at Homburg and Marienbad, just as if she had been learning by heart pages of the World; while Mrs. Majendie, with higher flight, knowing he was musical, again discussed the Handel Festival, and knew facts about Schubert which would have been most reliable if she had not got him mixed up with Schumann. Lucia, on the other hand, profiting by these failures, did quite differently: she talked about the difficulty of growing broad beans in a very small garden, and wondered whether they were of nervous constitution, and were disturbed by the passing trains, praised Canterbury bells for growing anywhere with equanimity, and let out casually, as if by accident, that she had set herself to learn "Hamlet" by heart as a holiday task. She had taken his measure exactly.

Before this date Aunt Catherine had got "an idea." She felt quite sure that beneath her very own eyes, and in her very own house, there was going on what she would have called a courtship. She could see—though, of course, Lucia, dear child! was utterly unconscious of it—how immensely attracted Lord Brayton was by her, and with a heroic sacrifice of her own inclinations, since every word, every look, that passed between the two was a matter of the intensest interest to her, she proceeded after lunch to leave them alone in the veranda, in the most natural manner possible, and go down to the kitchen-garden to see about the broad beans which had entered into the conversation at lunch. It was a bad excuse, for she knew that Johnson had " seen about " them last week, and had torn them up by the roots, as they were mere cumberers of the ground. But she trusted that Lucia did not remember that.