Even as I was laughing to myself again, the car turned in at a stone-pillared entrance, and its plumply-tyred wheels purred on a perfectly-gravelled drive between tall laurel-hedges. Oh! we were nearly there, then. I didn’t want to laugh any more. Now for it.... CHAPTER XI MEETING “HIS” PEOPLE We skirted what seemed like an ocean of green velvet turf. We swept round another corner. “There’s the house,” announced Mr. Waters. “_That_——?” It was long and low and white and homely—yes! _homely_-looking—overgrown with purple wistaria, and swept at one end by a fountain of gold from an immense laburnum-tree. A deep, shady verandah was flung like a protecting arm about the waist of the house. The late sunlight flashed on a scurry of something all goldeny-white, as there rushed out of the shade of this verandah what looked like a mix-up of several dogs and flying skirts.... “_Girls?_” I thought, as two slender, white-clad figures came towards me. “Who are _these_?” “My sisters, Theodora and Blanche,” said the Governor quickly to me. “_Down_, Cariad! Down, sir,” to the little dog—there was only one of him, it appeared, when he stopped frisking for a moment about the man who was helping me to alight. The taller of the two girls came forward first, murmured timidly, “So glad you’ve come!” held out both hands with an awkward, diffident little smile that was quite charming, and bent very shyly to kiss me. She was about eighteen, with fair hair, and features very cleanly-cut and something like her brother’s. “_I_ am Blanche,” she murmured. “This is Theo.” “Theo,” seemed to be about fifteen. My first impression of her showed me a pair of long coltish legs and a round cowslip-bell of a head, covered with short yellow curls. She said nothing, but she _looked_, looked at me out of a pair of the largest and brightest brown eyes that I had ever met; they seemed almost the size of the goggles in a diver’s helmet, and I felt them following me devouringly as I was led into the hall. “Here is Nancy, Mother,” called Mr. Waters. Another figure came forward to meet me. This—his mother? A startling contrast indeed to what I’d pictured her. She was dressed in the soft, lacy, unshaped black that best suits an elderly lady; and her soft, puffed-out hair was grey all over. But that was as far as the “elderliness” of the Governor’s mother went. Her figure was as tall and seemed nearly as slender as Blanche’s; she had the long-armed, free movements that I’ve heard my father praise in Miss Ellen Terry; her face was pink and irregular-featured and mobile, her expression shy and smiling. She seemed like some girl who had fallen into a trance in the “Eighties,” from which she had just woken up to find that her hair was no longer brown, and that the world, which puzzled her a little, had gone on without her. Her voice was soft and hesitating, and full of unexpected half-tones.