For a while his death made small difference to the family at the Parsonage. They had fought his enmity and proved it not formidable for brave hearts. But they had scarcely realised their success, and wondered why his death did not affect them more.
About this time Taffy began to carry out a scheme which he and his father had often discussed, but hitherto had found no leisure for— the setting up of wooden crosses on the graves of the drowned sailormen. They had wished for slate, but good slate was expensive and hard to come by, and Taffy had no skill in stone-cutting. Since wood it must be, he resolved to put his best work into it. The names, etc., should be engraved, not painted merely. Some of the pew-fronts in the church had panels elaborately carved in flat and shallow relief—fine Jacobean designs, all of them. He took careful rubbings of their traceries, and set to work to copy them on the face of his crosses.
One afternoon, some three weeks after the Squire’s funeral, he happened to return to the house for a tracing which he had forgotten, and found Honoria seated in the kitchen and talking with his father and mother. She was dressed in black, of course, and either this or the solemnity of her visit gave her quite a grown-up look. But, to be sure, she was mistress of Tredinnis now, and a child no longer.
Taffy guessed the meaning of her visit at once. And no doubt this act of formal reconciliation between Tredinnis House and the Parsonage had cost her some nervousness. As Taffy entered his parents stood up and seemed just as awkward as their visitor. “Another time, perhaps,” he heard his father say. Honoria rose almost at once, and would not stay to drink tea, though Humility pressed her.
“I suppose,” said Taffy next day, looking up from his Virgil, “I suppose Miss Honoria wants to make friends now and help on the restoration?”
Mr. Raymond, who was on his knees fastening a loose hinge in a pew-door, took a screw from between his lips.
“Yes, she proposed that.”
“It must be splendid for you, dad!”
“I don’t quite see,” answered Mr. Raymond, with his head well inside the pew.
Taffy stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and took a turn up and down the aisle.