"And your dear ma, how's she?" inquired the good lady presently, settling a cover on a saucepan in a decisive manner, and sitting down during a pause in her operations. "I saw her drive by yesterday; and Susan told me she'd been at the school. A blessed time children have of it these days, going to school; it's very different to what it was in my time."
"Then you didn't go to school?" I asked, being privately of opinion that she was rather fortunate as a child.
"Oh yes, sir, I went to school, but not like the schooling children has now-a-days, with a high-born lady like your ma going herself to see them;—our old dame, she teached us all she knew—to read, and mark, and learn,—"
"And inwardly digest?" I suggested, as Mrs. Groves hesitated in her enumeration of accomplishments.
But there was not time to satisfy me concerning this branch of her education, for old George appearing at the moment, I flew to meet him, and we strolled down to the water's edge together.
"I've been longing to see you," I exclaimed. "It's about Aleck, my cousin Aleck, I wanted to tell you. He's coming, and uncle and aunt Gordon, on Thursday week; that's only just a fortnight, you know."
Aleck was my only boy cousin, and ever since there had been a notion of his coming to Braycombe, I had been thinking and dreaming of him incessantly. My aunt Gordon had been in very delicate health, and the doctors ordered foreign air and constant change for the summer months, and a winter in some warm climate. There had been some hesitation as to how my cousin, their only child, should be disposed of. He was not very strong, and school life, it was feared, might be too great an ordeal for another year; so my parents had written, offering that he should spend that time at Braycombe, and share my tutor's instructions. The decisive answer from my uncle had only just arrived, and I was in a tumult of joy and excitement that it was in favour of my cousin's coming to stay with us, and that the actual day of our visitors' arrival had been fixed.
George listened with every appearance of interest to my communication.
"I'm glad your cousin's coming, Master Willie, as you're pleased," he said.
"But aren't you glad, too, for your own sake?" I asked. "It will be so nice having him to play with us."