But she thought better of it, and postponed the visit. “I shall be sure to say something I shall be sorry for after,” said she; so she sat down again, and returned to her grief.
Nor could she ever shake it off as thoroughly as she had done any other trouble in her life.
Months after this, she said to Sally, with a burst of tears, “I never nursed but one, and I shall never nurse another; and now he is across the seas.”
She kept the old gypsy at the farm; or, to speak more correctly, she made the farm his headquarters. She assigned him the only bedroom he would accept, viz., a cattle-shed, open on one side. She used often to have him into her room when she was alone; she gave him some of her husband's clothes, and made him wear a decent hat; by these means she effaced, in some degree, his nationality, and then she compelled her servants to call him “the foreign gent.”
The foreign gent was very apt to disappear in fine weather, but rain soon drove him back to her fireside, and hunger to her flesh-pots.
On the very day the foreign gent came to Meyrick's farm Lady Bassett had a letter by post from Reginald.
“DEAR MAMMA—I am gone with the gypsies across the water. I am sorry to leave you. You are the right sort: but they tormented me so with their books and their dark rooms. It is very unfortunate to be a boy. When I am a man, I shall be too old to be tormented, and then I will come back.
“Your dutiful son,
“REGINALD.”
Lady Bassett telegraphed Sir Charles, and he returned to Huntercombe, looking old, sad, and worn.