I am pinned up and presentable, and look exactly like aunt Phoebe.
You may come in.”
I opened the door and went into the boudoir.
She was sitting on the stool before the fire, and for a moment I scarcely recognized her, she looked so different out of mourning.
She had a white dressing wrapper around her, tied at the throat and at the wrists with ribbon, and her hair was pinned on the top of her head, instead of parted smoothly in the center.
I had never seen anything less like aunt Phoebe, or aunt anyone.
I stood blinking at her in the doorway.
“Come and sit down.
Don’t look so startled,” she said to me.
I shut the door behind me, and went and sat down on a chair.
“Forgive me,” I said, “but the point is that I have never seen a woman in undress before.”
“This isn’t undress,” she said, “it’s what I wear at breakfast.
Ambrose used to call it my nun’s robe.”
She raised her arms, and began to jab pins into her hair.
“At twenty-four,” she said, “it is high time you saw a pleasant homely sight such as aunt Phoebe doing up her hair.
Are you embarrassed?”
I folded my arms and crossed my legs, and continued to look at her.
“Not in the slightest,” I said, “merely stunned.”
She laughed, and holding the pins in her mouth took them one by one, and winding her hair into a roll placed it the way it should go, in the low knot behind.
The whole matter only took a few seconds, or so it seemed to me.
“Do you do that every day in so short a time?” I asked, amazed.
“Oh, Philip, what a lot you have to learn,” she said to me; “have you never seen your Louise pin up her hair?”
“No, and I wouldn’t want to,” I answered swiftly, with a sudden memory of Louise’s parting remark as I left Pelyn.
My cousin Rachel laughed, and dropped a hairpin on my knee.
“A keepsake,” she said.
“Put it under your pillow, and watch Seecombe’s face at breakfast in the morning.”
She passed from the boudoir into the bedroom opposite, leaving the door wide open.
“You can sit there and shout through to me while I dress,” she called.
I looked furtively at the little bureau to see if there was any sign of my godfather’s letter, but could see nothing.
I wondered what had happened.
Perhaps she had it with her in the bedroom.
It might be that she would say nothing to me, that she would treat the matter as a private one between my godfather and herself.
I hoped so.
“Where have you been all day?” she called to me.
“I had to go into town,” I said, “there were people there I was obliged to see.”
I need not say a word about the bank.
“I was so happy with Tamlyn and the gardeners,” she called.
“There were only very few of the plants to be thrown away.
There is so much, Philip, you know, still to be done in that plantation; the undergrowth bordering the meadow should be cleared, and a walk laid down, and the whole ground there given up to camellias, so that in less than twenty years you could have a spring garden there that the whole of Cornwall would come to see.”
“I know,” I said; “that was what Ambrose intended.”
“It needs careful planning,” she said, “and not just left to chance and Tamlyn.
He is a dear, but his knowledge is limited.
Why do you not take more interest in it yourself?”
“I don’t know enough,” I said, “it was never my department anyway.
Ambrose knew that.”
“There must be people who could help you,” she said.
“You could have a designer down from London to lay it out.”
I did not answer.
I did not want a designer down from London.
I was pretty sure she knew more about it than any designer.