‘Shall we come here in the early morning, and set it to rights?’
‘I forgot it was Sunday,’ said Owen, hastily throwing down the weed he had plucked up.
‘You were doing no harm, my dear; but we will not leave it in this state. Will you come with us, Lucy?’
Lucilla had escaped, and was standing aloof at the end of the path, and when her brother went towards her, she turned away.
‘Come, Lucy,’ he entreated, ‘come into the garden with us. We want you to tell us the old places.’
‘I’m not coming,’ was all her answer, and she ran back to the party who stood by the church door, and began to chatter to Mr. Prendergast, over whom she had domineered even before she could speak plain. A silent, shy man, wrapped up in his duties, he was mortally afraid of the Castle Blanch young ladies, and stood ill at ease, talked down by Miss Horatia Charteris, but his eye lighted into a smile as the fairy plaything of past years danced up to him, and began her merry chatter, asking after every one in the parish, and showing a perfect memory of names and faces such as amazed him, in a child so young as she had been at the time when she had left the parish. Honora and Owen meantime were retracing recollections in the rectory garden, eking out the boy’s four years old memories with imaginations and moralizings, pondering over the border whence Owen declared he had gathered snowdrops for his mother’s coffin; and the noble plane tree by the water-side, sacred to the memory of Bible stories told by his father in the summer evenings—
‘That tree!’ laughed Lucilla, when he told her that night as they walked up-stairs to bed. ‘Nobody could sit there because of the mosquitoes. And I should like to see the snowdrops you found in November!’
‘I know there were some white flowers. Were they lilies of the valley for little Mary?’
‘It will do just as well,’ said Lucilla. She knew that she could bring either scene before her mind with vivid distinctness, but shrinking from the pain almost with horror, she only said, ‘It’s a pity you aren’t a Roman Catholic, Owen; you would soon find a hole in a rock, and say it was where a saint, with his head under his arm, had made a footmark.’
‘You are very irreverent, Lucy, and very cross besides. If you would not come and tell us, what could we do?’