Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/61



T was in early April that Jill and Richard Graham came back to Buissac. Jill drove the car along the winding valley road, its bordering poplars sharp and silvery against an apple-green sky. Behind them the sunset was apricot-coloured; and the cliffs were a cold mauve. Jill liked to drive and Graham liked to be driven; he said that he could not see anything at the steering-wheel. He sat, now, his scarf up around his ears, for the hood was down, gazing; silent. For hours, while they drove, he would sit like that, saying not a word, and Jill, as if she heard, through closed doors, a great orchestra playing, was vaguely aware of the splendid rhythms and harmonies that wreathed and unwreathed themselves in his mind. There was something sad in listening to an orchestra behind closed doors; yet something rather uplifting too. Even if one were left out, one was uplifted. She had not known the mingled state now for a long time.

Dick had disliked the Riviera as much as ever and had done no work there at all. In the intervals of tennis and dancing—and no one she had ever met, Jill considered, danced so divinely as Dick—he had sat in solitary, sunny corners above the sea and read metaphysics. Jill asked him to read aloud to her, when she found him thus, and stared at him with incredulous