Scheherazade by Florence Warden

When the time came for them to finish their stay in Norfolk by the dreaded three days at Willingham, neither George nor Nouna made any secret of the fact that they felt the coming visit to be a severe ordeal. Undoubtedly it would be a cruelly abrupt change from the cheerful homeliness of the Lodge, to the penitential atmosphere in which the household of Lady Florencecourt passed their days. So notorious was the character of the gracious _châtelaine_ that Willingham Hall was commonly known in the neighbourhood as the House of Correction, a title to which the severely simple style of its architecture gave no very flat denial. Willingham Church stood in the grounds belonging to the Hall, so that Nouna had had an opportunity of shuddering at the sombre dreariness of the mansion even before the return call she had made with Lady Millard and Cicely, on which occasion she had sat almost mute on a high-backed chair, looking as insignificant and unhappy as a starved mouse, thinking that Lady Florencecourt's light eyes looked like the glass marbles with which she played at solitaire, and what a good model her face would be for one of those indiarubber heads that children squeeze up into grotesque grimaces.

She cried at parting with the Millards, like a little girl sent to school for the first time. Sir Henry, with his simple good humour; Lady Millard, with her quiet manners, and the quick black eyes whose flashing keenness and sympathy showed the burning soul of the New World flickering in uneasy brightness among the glowing embers of the Old; Cicely and Charlotte, fair, kind creatures, who filled up the pauses gracefully, the one by merely smiling, the other by a gentle rain of chatter which she had been taught to think a fascinating social accomplishment; and, above all, Ella, of the sallow face, the sharp tongue, and the warm heart, were a group to live pleasantly in the memory, and to make the approaching encounter with the unamiable hosts of Willingham more disagreeable by contrast. It added to poor Nouna's forlornness in these circumstances that her husband absolutely forbade her taking Sundran with her, as, although he was very anxious for an accidental meeting between Lord Florencecourt and the Indian woman, he felt that he could not force upon his host the presence of a person to whom, if only as the result of a prejudice, he had a strong aversion.