“My brother Simon and your cousin David—God knows I have done my best for them! But it is casting pearls before—you know the scriptural allusion, my dear—to endeavour to raise them to any sense of duty. The place is indeed going to wrack and ruin. They are no better than Amalakites and Ephesians. Between David’s star-worshipping on the one side, like the Muezzin on his Marinet, and your father’s black arts and other incomprehensible doings in his cave of Adullam, my heart is nearly broken. And yet, my dear child, I have not failed, as Paul enjoins, with the word in reason and out of reason. I fear for you, child in this Topheepot!”
“Do not fear for me,” cried Ellinor; her voice was caught up by little titters. “Perhaps,” she added insinuatingly, “if you advise me things may alter for the better.”
“Advice shall not fail you.”
“I shall coax cousin David to let me manage for him.”
Ellinor was still sitting on her heels. She now looked up innocently at Madam Tutterville. And Madam Tutterville looked down at her with a suddenly appraising eye and was struck by a brilliant inspiration over which, in her determination to keep to herself, she buttoned up her mouth with much mystery.
Ellinor had grown—there could be no doubt of that—into a remarkably handsome woman. There was so much gold in her hair, there were so many twists and little misty tendrils, that one could hardly find it in one’s heart to regret that it should so closely verge on the red. It grew in three peaks and wantoned upon a luminously white forehead.
“She has the Cheveral eyebrows,” thought the parson’s wife, absently tracing her own with a plump, approving finger.
Of the charm of the little straight nose, of the pointed chin, of the curves of the wide, eager mouth, there could be no two opinions. Nothing but admiration likewise for the lines of throat and shoulder and all the rest of the lithe figure on the eve of perfection. It was the beauty of the rose the day before it ought to be gathered. Madam Tutterville gave a small laugh, fraught with secret meaning.
“Amen, child,” said she irrelevantly at last. “Yes, I will have some corporal refreshment; you may give me a cup of tea. But you will have your hands full, I can tell you, with that Nutmeg—Oh, what a house of squanderings and malversations has Bindon become since my days!”
“I saw something of the state of affairs last night,” said Ellinor, as she lifted the kettle from the hob on to the fire to boil again and emptied the contents of the squat teapot into the basin.