Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. "How is he? " she asked the chauffeur. But Jaxton was vague, didn't rightly know. Privately, he thought it was one of those ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned.
They drove up to Gattenden, and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely beautiful that Elinor began to feel less anxious and even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn't she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same time. Passing the north entrance to the park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden's bath chair standing just inside the gate. The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road, the reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second's glimpse of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so often seen him sitting and reading, that brief revelation of life living itself regularly, unvaryingly, in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the calm loveliness of beech trees and bracken, of green-golden foreground and violet distances.
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