“I can’t think what’s keeping her,” was the irrelevant reply.
Mrs. Hesketh stared at her cousin with grave-eyed interrogation.
“Oh, I mean Letty Glyn, Tom’s niece, you know, Maudie. Didn’t I tell you that we expect her this evening, by the two o’clock from St. Pancras?”
“So you did; and she is coming to stay for some time?”
“To live with us altogether,” eagerly amended Colonel Fenchurch. “She is an orphan, the daughter of my poor sister Kathleen.”
Mrs. Hesketh glanced from him to his wife, but Mrs. Fenchurch’s expression was blank and noncommittal; she rose, walked to the fire, and brushed the crumbs from her habit into the fender.
“We are her only relations,” continued Colonel Fenchurch.
“Except her father’s people, who are paupers,” corrected a thin, high-pitched treble from the fire-place. “Irish paupers—with nothing to live on but family pride.”
“If she is like my poor sister, she ought to be a beauty,” urged her uncle, and his tone was anxious and conciliatory.
“She was some way from that when we last saw her,” declared his wife, turning to face them; “a long-legged creature, with a pair of sunken eyes and quantities of tousled hair. Of course, she may have improved,” she added tolerantly; “and,” with a glance at her husband’s chiselled profile, “I hope she will take after the Fenchurch family. A girl with a pretty face does get such a splendid start.”