I lay awake quite half an hour that night, and I made up my mind—just as seriously as though my feelings were likely to prove an important influence—that I would in no way try to bias my father in his decision about taking a bailiff. But real as was my trouble about this matter that to me was so mighty, it was all put to flight the next morning by an occurrence of more personal and immediate interest. Such is the blessed elasticity of youth. The occurrence was one which not only brought the remembrance of Captain Forrester, and my romantic dreams for Joyce, once more vividly to my mind, but it also gave no small promise of enjoyment to myself. It consisted in the sudden appearance of a groom from the Manor, who delivered into my hands a note for mother.
It was morning when he came; mother was still in the kitchen with Deborah, and Joyce and I had not finished making our beds and dusting our room. But I do not think there was any delay in the answering of that door-bell. I remember how cross I was when mother would insist on finishing all her business before she opened the note; she went into the poultry-yard and decided what chickens and what ducks should be killed for the week's dinners, she went into the dairy to look at the cream, she even went up herself into the loft to get apples before she would go and find her spectacles in the parlor. And yet any one could have imagined that a note from the squire meant something very important. And so, indeed, it did. It contained a formal invitation to a grand ball to be given at the Manor-house. The card did not say a "grand" ball, but of course we knew that it would be a grand ball. We were fairly dazed with excitement. Actually a ball in our quiet little village. Such a thing had not been known since I had been grown up, and I had not even heard of its having occurred since the days when young Mrs. Broderick had come to the Manor as a bride. Of course we had been to dances in town once or twice—once to the Hoads', and once to a county ball, got up at the White Hart Inn, but I think these were really the only two occasions on which I had danced anywhere out of the dancing academy. Joyce, being a little older, could count about three more such exciting moments in her life. The card was passed round from hand to hand, and then stuck up on the mantle-shelf in front of the clock, as though there were any danger that any of the family would be likely to forget on what day and at what hour Squire Broderick had invited us to "dancing" at the Manor.
"I wonder what has made the squire give a ball now," said mother. "I suppose it's the prospect of the elections. He thinks he owes it to the county."
"Why on earth should he owe the county a ball because of the elections?" cried I. "He is not going to stand, and I don't think he can suppose that a ball would be likely to do the Farnham interests much good, if that's the only man they have got to put forward on the Conservative side."
"I don't think it's a young girl's business to talk in that flippant way, Margaret," said the mother. Father was not present just then. "I don't think it's becoming in young folk to talk about matters they can't possibly understand."
I was nettled at this, but I did not dare to answer mother back.
"You never heard your father talk like that of Mr. Farnham, I'm sure," added mother. "He likes him a great deal better than he does Mr. Thorne, although Mr. Thorne is a Radical."
"Well, I should think so! Mr. Thorne is a capitalist, and father doesn't think that men who have made such large fortunes in business ought to exist," cried I, boldly, applying a theory to an individual as I thought I had been taught. "It is no use his being a Radical, nor giving money to the poor, because he oughtn't to have the money. It's dreadful to think of his having bought a beautiful old place like the Priory with money that he has ground out of his workpeople. No, nobody will ever like Mr. Thorne in the neighborhood."
"I know squire and he don't hold together at all," answered mother. "Though they do say Mr. Thorne bought the property through that handsome young spark of a nephew of the squire's. The families were acquainted up North."
"Who told you that, mother?" asked I, quickly.