"From their lawyer."
"And you held your tongue about it?"
"There was nothing to say," said Elizabeth, with a smile.
Percival shrugged his shoulders, and went back to the drawing-room.
CHAPTER IX.
ELIZABETH'S WOOING.
Percival and his friend dined with the Herons that evening. Mr. Heron was an artist by profession; he was a fair, abstracted-looking man, with gold eye-glasses, which he was always sticking ineffectually upon the bridge of his nose and nervously feeling for when they tumbled down again. He had painted several good pictures in his time, and was in the habit of earning a fairly good income; but owing to some want of management, either on his part or his wife's, his income never seemed quite large enough for the needs of the household. The servants' wages were usually in arrear; the fittings of the house were broken and never repaired; there were wonderful gaps in the furniture and the china, which nobody ever appeared to think of filling up. Rupert remembered the ways of the house when he had boarded there, and was not surprised to find himself dining upon mutton half-burnt and half-raw, potatoes more like bullets than vegetables, and a partially cooked rice-pudding, served upon the remains of at least three dinner-services, accompanied by sour beer and very indifferent claret. Percival did not even pretend to eat; he sat back in his chair and declared, with an air of polite disgust, that he was not hungry. Rupert made up for his deficiencies, however; he swallowed what was set before him and conversed with his hostess, who was quite unconscious that anything was amiss. Mrs. Heron had a vague taste for metaphysics and political economy; she had beautiful theories of education, which she was always intending, at some future time, to put into practice for the benefit of her three little boys, Harry, Willy, and Jack. She spoke of these theories, with her blue eyes fixed on vacancy and her fork poised gracefully in the air, while Vivian laboured distastefully through his dinner, and Percival frowned in silence at the table-cloth.
"I have always thought," Mrs. Heron was saying sweetly, "that children ought not to be too much controlled. Their development should be perfectly free. My children grow up like young plants, with plenty of sun and air; they play as they like; they work when they feel that they can work best; and, if at times they are a little noisy, at any rate their noise never develops into riot."
Percival did not, perhaps, intend her to hear him, but, below his breath, he burst into a sardonic, little laugh and an aside to his sister Kitty.