“You might have left them by the door,” observed Emmie.
Susan thought, though too respectful to say what she thought, that her young ladies had never dropped tracts in the mud for the poor to stoop to pick up; the vicar’s daughters had always given such papers with the pleasant smile which had insured for them a welcome. In distributing religious literature, as in most other matters, success greatly depends on the manner in which a thing is done.
Emmie was not satisfied with this her first essay in cottage-visiting. “I never thought of finding workmen at home,” she observed to Susan.
“I think, miss, that twelve is a common dinner-hour,” said Susan, “and that then some of the men come home from their work.”
“Then assuredly twelve is a bad visiting hour,” cried Emmie; “we had better return home directly.” The young lady walked back to Myst Court at a much quicker pace than had been hers when she had started on her little expedition. She was glad to find herself within the gate and in the shrubbery again.
“I have not had much success, but still I can tell Bruce that I have made a beginning, that I have broken the ice,” thought Emmie. “That woman was civil enough; I should not have much minded going into the cottage had I chanced to find her alone.”
As Emmie’s brothers were, as usual, passing the day at S——, Mr. Trevor was his daughter’s only companion at luncheon. The master of Myst Court was a pleasant, kindly-looking man, who had reached the shady side of fifty, but with a form yet unbent and hair but lightly touched with gray. He had been from youth a steady hard-working man, and Bruce had probably derived his habits of business from his father’s example. But with Mr. Trevor the wheel of labour had hitherto run in one groove, or rather, one may say, on a tramway made smooth by habit. It had been as natural to Mr. Trevor to go to his office, as it had been to partake of his breakfast. The complete change in his mode of life caused by the removal to Wiltshire, was like the jarring caused by turning suddenly off the tramway into a stone-paved road. Mr. Trevor had not been trained to perform the duties of a landlord and country squire, and he more than suspected that what he might have gained in dignity of position he had lost in comfort. Now as he sat at table in the lofty dining-room of his stately mansion, Mr. Trevor’s brow wore an expression of worry which Emmie had never seen upon it when the family had resided in Summer Villa.
“You look tired, dear papa,” she observed.
“I have had a good deal to annoy me, Emmie,” said her father, who was making very slow progress indeed with his plateful of beef, tough and not much more than warmed through. “I find that Farmer Vesey has been taking, in a most unscrupulous manner, a slice off my west field which borders upon his lands. The steward says that I shall have to go to law about it. I detest going to law! Why are not boundaries clearly marked! Then I’ve had endless complaints from the people whose cottages border the brook below Bullen’s dye-works; they say that the dye kills all the fish, and makes the water unfit for drinking. Really the complaints have good foundation. I walked down to-day to the place, and saw that the water is so discoloured that I would not let a dog slake his thirst in a stream so polluted.”
“And are the cottagers your tenants, papa?”