Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/86



T was three days later that Graham, carrying his easel, canvas, and painting utensils, went up to the Manoir. The day was fine and he had told Madame de Lamouderie that he would not come unless it rained; but he had spent the morning far down the river, painting from the bank, and, coming in late for lunch, as he often did, found Jill departed in the car. She would not be back till tea-time. So the moment seemed opportune for beginning the long-promised portrait of the old lady. But deeper than the sense of the opportune, the mood was upon him to test again upon his own nerves, unfortified by Jill, the uncanny quality he felt in the Manoir and its occupants; its unknown occupants. The old lady he did not feel uncanny. He understood her too well for that.

It was a lovely, melancholy spring day and a solitary thrush was fluting and calling in the chestnut forest. Most of the thrushes would have been shot and eaten during the winter, but that gave a wilder, sweeter potency to this surviving song.

Wild daffodils grew among the glades, and a powdering of violets rested like a soft blue cloud along the roadside. Already the mood of the other day seemed exorcised. His blood ran peacefully. How strange it was to know oneself at heart still so much the child of