“Mr. Fox, as soon as your feet touch Lancashire soil, bless the dear land for me.” And he answered, “I will not forget. And you?” he added, “remember to keep your up-head and your up-heart like a Lancashire lass ought to do.” This pleasant evening brought forth its fruit a little later.
About April Lilly wrote me that she was coming home. She said the Reverend Joseph Brown, the famous minister of the Kent Road Church—which was attended by all the Colville family, had advised her to do so; and that her uncle had bought her a passage, and would himself see her safely on board. “It is all right for me to come home, Mamma,” she continued. “I know now, that I never ought to have left you. Mary would have been better here, than I could ever be. She is more Scotch, and I am so English, that the very word ‘England’ tastes sweet on my lips, if I only speak it. Mary would have considered her words and ways, and her P’s and Q’s, and I have no doubt, would have won both the old lady, and the half-dozen or more 310 young ones. The four boys understood me better than any one, but after all, my visit to grandmother is a broad failure. Uncle David is all right, and I don’t mind people not loving me, if they are only just. But I am coming home to you, Mamma, and I know you will say, ‘Lilly, dear, you did right.’”
Three days after we received this letter, Mary went to New York, to the office of the New York Democrat to see Mr. Sykes, the publisher, and Brick Pomeroy, its clever editor; for I had written, mainly during sleepless nights, a novel, and I thought perhaps, from what I had read and heard of these gentlemen, they would take it. She had a long talk with Mr. Sykes, and the final result was a lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Sykes, and her engagement as governess to their two children. Mary was delighted; she longed for a more vivid and useful life, and she loved the city, and hated the country.
“You see, Mamma,” she said, “Mrs. Sykes wants me very much, and I like her. She is so pretty, and so beautifully dressed, and so fond of amusements. I shall see everything with her, and Mr. Sykes will pay my board, and give me twenty dollars a month. And you know Lilly may be here any day, and you do not need both of us.”
So in April Mary went to Mrs. Sykes, and Lilly came home a few days after she had left me, and when she had told me her pitiful little story, I considered her determination to return to America quite justifiable. That Dr. Joseph Brown and his family had been her warm friends was sufficient for me; also she took particular pains to make me understand that her uncle’s attitude to her, from first to last, had been supremely just. That of course, justice, was the rock on which David Colville stood; he would not have been unjust to his worst enemy.
The school closed in June, and I could see on Lilly’s face an invincible determination that it should not re-open. Whether she would have succeeded in inducing me to give it up, I know not, but one Sunday Mr. Libbey and his sons called, and in the course of conversation Mr. Libbey said to me,
“Mrs. Barr, the boys are going in September to Princeton 311 to continue their education there. I do not think your school here will then support you. What do you think of doing?”
“I do not know,” I answered. “I must consider.”
“I have heard you say that you knew Mr. Beecher.”
“Yes, in a way, not very well. I met him in Glasgow many years ago. I dare say he has quite forgotten me.”