These Delights by Sara Seale Page A

up with such an invasion in these difficult times. After all, the man doesn’t have the worry of domestic things, does he? If you and Diana had already been married, Luke, I don’t know how you would have managed. Is this visit likely to be an annual event, do you think?”
    Luke looked her straight in the eyes.
    “I shall hope to see more of my cousins, yes,” he said quietly. “I find them very refreshing, and we have a lot of lost time to make up, having become acquainted so late.”
    “Oh, quite, quite,” said Lady Sale vaguely, and tried not to catch her daughter’s frown of annoyance.
    “Here come Sir Harry and Vicky.” Luke sounded relieved as he got to his feet. “I think I had better find the other two, Lady Sale. I ought to be getting back to the farm.”
    “Oh, Luke!” Vicky ran to him and clasped both hands round his arm. “Sir Harry has the most wonderful roses I’ve ever seen. Look! He has given me a Caroline Testout. It was a great honor.”
    “An honor indeed!” laughed Luke, touching the pink rose tucked into the bodice of her frock. “It gives you a most elegant air of distinction. Are you ready to go home, monkey?”
    Lady Sale’s hard eyes watched them, Vicky with her ardent face raised laughingly to his, and Luke, looking down at her with that hint of tenderness in his smile.
    “Here are the children,” she said, looking beyond them to the water-garden, “and—oh, heavens! The child must have fallen in the pond!”
    It was true. T h ey hurried across the lawn, Pauline scolding as she ran, but L o u for the first time was enjoying the party. He was sopping wet.
    “I fell in! I fell in!” he yelled. “And what do you think? There’s a frog in my pocket! I’m going to take it home for Bibi.”
    “Fairly normal, I think, Lady Sale,” said Luke, his eyes twinkling. “No, you can’t take it home for Bibi, Lou. Rabbits don’t eat frogs.”
    “Not to eat—to play with! ” shouted Lou.
    “Bibi wouldn’t like it, nor would the frog. Let it go, Lou, and then we must all say good-bye, and get you home and into some dry clothes.”
    They made their farewells, and Sir Harry, having much enjoyed his afternoon, went with them to see them off. But Diana, although she kissed Luke good-bye, and accepted an invitation for Sunday supper, remained with her mother on the terrace and thoughtfully lit a cigarette.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    J une was a lovely month without a drop of rain, and Tom Bowden’s prophecy of a hot summer looked like coming true. Already the bracken had a brittle look, and the little river, Scaw, had become a shallow stream with the cattle-crossing dry above it. Next month they would be cutting the hay which grew high and lush in Luke’s meadows, and it was here that Vicky liked to come with a book and lie in the cool grass of a summer afternoon and stare at the sky.
    Often Luke found her there and would look down at her slim young body stretched at his feet, and sometimes she would hold out her arms and coax him to waste a few minutes beside her. He reflected with satisfaction how much better the three Jordan s looked after a month on the farm. Vicky, especially, had benefitted. Her arms were rounder, the hollows below the high cheek-bones were beginning to fill out and her skin had tanned to a warm apricot. Against it her hair looked like pale honey.
    “I think you must be a lorelei, or one of the sirens who distracted poor Ulysses,” he told her once, when, yielding to persuasion, he sat down beside her and lit a cigarette.
    “It’s good to relax and think about something else but work,” she told him seriously. “Diana thinks I’m very idle.”
    “Diana likes her day planned for her,” he replied. “Or rather, she likes to plan it herself. She is an energetic young woman and often puts me to shame.”
    “But just to have energy is not to be alive,” she said. “Sometimes too much energy, too much planning, makes one miss the important things.”
    “And