“What are those chimneys I can just see straight over the fields?” she asked her aunt.
“Leas Farm,” she replied. “It belongs to Mr Oswald, a very respectable farmer, who owns a good deal of land round here. We have our milk and butter from him. Your uncle used to keep his own cows, but he found them a trouble, and Mrs Oswald is an excellent dairy woman.”
Here was an opportunity for Anna’s explanation. The words were on her lips, when they were interrupted by the loud sound of a bell from the house.
“The breakfast bell!” said Mrs Forrest, abruptly turning away from her roses, and beginning to hasten towards the house, without pausing a moment. “I hope you will always be particular in one point, my dear Anna, and that is punctuality. More hangs upon it than most people recognise: the comfort of a household certainly does. If you are late for one thing, you are late for the next, and so on, until the whole day is thrown into disorder. I am obliged to map my day carefully out to get through my business, and I expect others to do the same. I speak seriously, because your father is one of the most unpunctual men I ever knew; and if you have inherited his failing, you cannot begin to struggle against it too soon.”
Anna had not been many days at the Vicarage before she found that punctuality was Aunt Sarah’s idol, and that nothing offended her more than want of respect to it from others. Certainly everything went like clockwork at Waverley, and though Anna fancied that Mr Forrest inwardly rebelled a little, he was outwardly quite submissive. All Aunt Sarah’s arrangements and plans were so neatly fitted into each other that the least transgression in one upset the next, and the effect of this was that she had no odds and ends of leisure to spare. Anna even found it difficult to put all the questions she had in her mind.
“Not now, my dear, I am engaged,” was the frequent reply. She managed to learn, however, that a visit to her grandfather had already been planned for that week, and that Mrs Forrest intended to leave her at his house at Dornton and fetch her again after driving farther on to make a call.
With this she was obliged to be satisfied, and it was quite strange how, after a few days, the new surroundings and rules and pleasures of Waverley seemed to make much that had filled her mind on her arrival fade and grow less important. She still wished to see her grandfather again; but the idea of being his chief comforter and support now seemed impossible, and rather foolish, and she would not have hinted it to Aunt Sarah on any account. Neither did it seem necessary, as the days went on, to mention her drive with Mr Oswald and the accident of passing her grandfather in the lane.