“‘Boy!’ Why hear her! Why he’s five years older than you, Sophie,” laughed her father.
“Well then he doesn’t look it,” retorted she. “And he’s always tied to his mother’s apron-string.”
“I wonder what Roland, the eldest one, is like,” said Margaret; “the one in America. I wonder he doesn’t come home.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t get on well at home,” suggested Olive. “But I wish he would come. He’s sure to be nice, if only as a change from his utterly horrid family. And nice people—or at any rate nice men—are conspicuous here by their absence.”
The rector frowned ever so slightly—for his favourite daughter added to her other peccadilloes a decided penchant for flirtation. But like a wise man he said nothing, and by this time they had reached the gates of their pretty and cheerful-looking home.
Chapter Four.
The Rector of Wandsborough.
The Rev. William Ingelow, Doctor of Divinity of the University of Oxford, had, at the time our story opens, held the living of Wandsborough about fifteen years.