'Dick dead!' the old man repeated with a bewildered air, and putting down his cup with a shaking hand. 'Dick dead, did you say? He was not so many years older than I, and always hale and strong. I ought to have gone first. There were only three of us, and Dick was the eldest.'
'It isn't your brother, Anthony, that is dead; he died long ago, dear. It is his grandson, little Dick—Dickie you used to call him. You had him up here, and he took his degree, and you gave him a college living. You remember little Dickie, Anthony?'
His wife's voice recalled his wandering thoughts.
'Yes, yes, my dear; certainly, I remember little Dick very well. He took a second class; he ought to have done better. He disappointed me. I had no son of my own to come after me, and I should have liked my brother Dick's son—grandson, to be sure—to have done well. He did his best, no doubt; but he disappointed me. If he had done better, he might have got a Fellowship. So Dickie is dead, you say, my dear?'
'Yes, uncle; and he has left poor little Lucy unprovided for. She has written to ask you what she ought to do. She wants to go out as a governess—a nursery governess.'
'A nursery governess? Dick's little girl a nursery governess! No, my dear, that will never do. Tell her to come here; there's plenty of room in the lodge for Dick's little girl. Write to her at once, Mary, and tell her as soon—as soon as the funeral is over—her father's funeral—poor little girl!—to come to the lodge. What do you say, Rachel?'
'I wish we could spare Mary to go to her,' the Master's wife said, wiping her eyes. 'Someone ought to fetch her away at once, as soon—as soon as it is all over. I think Mary ought to go to her.'
The Senior Tutor met the Master's niece in the court as he was coming away from a lecture during the morning, and she told him all about the letter her uncle had received and the death of his nephew, or, rather, his grand-nephew.
'You remember my cousin Dick?' she said; 'he was my second cousin. I am a generation older than he,' and she smiled at the admission. She was not the least ashamed of her age.
The Senior Tutor smiled too; he was thinking how well she wore her years, how her age, or the signs of it, her gray hairs and the lines on her face, became her. She would grow handsomer with the years, he told himself as he stood talking to her in the spring sunshine, and her face would grow finer as time went by: it was a fine face already; it could never by any chance grow plain. He had watched a great many faces grow old in his time—old, and lined, and soured—but he had never seen any face grow finer with the years like this woman's face had grown.