"And how is Mr. Paul?" asked Mrs. Dunn of Patty. "Dear young man, it's a long time since we've seen anything of him! I hope he's keeping his health well!"
"I think so—I hope so," said Patty gently. "He works very hard, you know, writing things for the papers. He is wanted too much to be able to take holidays like ordinary people. They couldn't get on without him."
Elizabeth turned round in astonishment: she had expected to see her sister in a blaze of wrath over Sam's unexpected communications. "I'm afraid you won't like this arrangement, dearie," she whispered. "What had we better do?"
"Oh, go—go," replied Patty, with a tremulous eagerness that she vainly tried to hide. "I don't mind it. I—I am glad to see Mr. Brion. It will be very nice to stay with him—and in our own dear old house too. Oh, I wouldn't refuse to go for anything! Besides we can't."
"No, I don't see how we can," acquiesced Elizabeth, cheerfully. Patty having no objection, she was delighted with the prospect.
They walked up the little pier in a group, the "hoss" following them with the reins upon his neck; and, while Elizabeth and Patty mounted the buggy provided by Mr. Brion, Eleanor gratified the old fisherman and his wife by choosing to stay with them and ride up in the cart. It was a lovely morning, just approaching noon, the sky as blue as—no, not as a turquoise or a sapphire—but as nothing save itself can be in a climate like ours, saturated with light and lucent colour, and giving to the sea its own but an intenser hue. I can see it all in my mind's eye—as my bodily eyes have seen it often—that dome above, that plain below, the white clouds throwing violet shadows on the water, the white gulls dipping their red legs in the shining surf and reflecting the sunlight on their white wings; but I cannot describe it. It is beyond the range of pen and ink, as of brush and pigments. As the buggy lightly climbed the steep cliff, opening the view wider at every step, the sisters sat hand in hand, leaning forward to take it all in; but they, too, said nothing—only inhaled long draughts of the delicious salt air, and felt in every invigorated fibre of them that they had done well to come. Reaching the crest of the bluff, and descending into the broken basin—or saucer, rather—in which Seaview Villa nestled, they uttered simultaneously an indignant moan at the spectacle of Mrs. Hawkins's devastations. There was the bright paint, and the whitewash, and the iron roof, and the fantastic trellis; and there was not the ivy that had mantled the eaves and the chimney stacks, nor the creepers that had fought so hard for existence, nor the squat verandah posts which they had bountifully embraced—nor any of the features that had made the old house distinct and characteristic.
"Never mind," said Patty, who was the first to recover herself. "It looks very smart and tidy. I daresay it wanted doing up badly. After all, I'd sooner see it look as unlike home as possible, now that it isn't home."
Mrs. Harris came out and warmly welcomed them in Mr. Brion's name. She took them into the old sitting-room, now utterly transformed, but cosy and inviting, notwithstanding, with the lawyer's substantial old leather chairs and sofas about it, and a round table in the middle set out for lunch, and the sea and sky shining in through the open verandah doors. She pressed them to have wine and cake to "stay" them till Eleanor and lunch time arrived; and she bustled about with them in their rooms—their own old bedrooms, in one of which was a collection of Paul's schoolboy books and treasures, while they took off their hats and washed their hands and faces; and was very motherly and hospitable, and made them feel still more pleased that they had come. They feasted, with fine appetites, on fish and gooseberry-fool at one o'clock, while Sam and Mrs. Dunn were entertained by the housekeeper in the kitchen; and in the afternoon, the cart and "hoss" having departed, they sat on the verandah in basket chairs, and drank tea, and idled, and enjoyed the situation thoroughly. Patty got a dog's-eared novel of Mayne Reid's from the book-case in her bedroom, and turned over the pages without reading them to look at the pencil marks and thumb stains; and Eleanor dozed and fanned herself; and Elizabeth sewed and thought. And then their host came home, riding up from the township on a fast and panting steed, quite thrown off his balance by emotion. He was abject in his apologies for having been deterred by cruel fate and business from meeting them at the steamer and conducting them in person to his house, and superfluous in expressions of delight at the honour they had conferred on him.
"And how did you leave my boy?" he asked presently, when due inquiries after their own health and welfare had been satisfied. He spoke as if they and Paul had all been living under one roof. "And when is he coming to see his old father again?"
Patty, who was sitting beside her host—"in his pocket," Nelly declared—and was simply servile in her affectionate demonstrations, undertook to describe Paul's condition and circumstances, and she implied a familiar knowledge of them which considerably astonished her sisters. She also gave the father a full history of all the son's good deeds in relation to themselves—described how he had befriended them in this and that emergency, and asserted warmly, and with a grave face, that she didn't know what they should have done without him.