Lady Bassett set herself to comfort and cheer him, and this was her gentle office for many a long month.
She was the more fit for it, that her own health and spirits revived the moment Reginald left the country with his friends the gypsies; the color crept back to her cheek, her spirits revived, and she looked as handsome, and almost as young, as when she married. She tasted tranquillity. Year after year went by without any news of Reginald, and the hope grew that he would never cross her threshold again, and Compton be Sir Charles's heir without any more trouble.
CHAPTER XLI.
OUR story now makes a bold skip. Compton Bassett was fourteen years old, a youth highly cultivated in mind and trained in body, but not very tall, and rather effeminate looking, because he was so fair and his skin so white.
For all that, he was one of the bowlers in the Wolcombe Eleven, whose cricket-ground was the very meadow in which he had erst gathered cowslips with Ruperta Bassett; and he had a canoe, which he carried to adjacent streams, however narrow, and paddled it with singular skill and vigor. A neighboring miller, suffering under drought, was heard to say, “There ain't water enough to float a duck; nought can swim but the dab-chicks and Muster Bassett.”
He was also a pedestrian, and got his father to take long walks with him, and leave the horses to eat their oats in peace.
In these walks young master botanized and geologized his own father, and Sir Charles gave him a little politics, history, and English poetry, in return. He had a tutor fresh from Oxford for the classics.
One day, returning with his father from a walk, they met a young lady walking toward them from the village; she was tall, and a superb brunette.
Now it was rather a rare thing to see a lady walking through that village, so both Sir Charles and his son looked keenly at her as she came toward them.