always find tenants for her house. So there she lived at her ease, called by many of her neighbours the Honourable Mrs. Morton, and finding listeners to her alternate accounts of the grandeur of Northmoor, and murmurs at the meanness of its master in only allowing her £300 a year, besides educating her children, and clothing two of them.
Ida considered herself to be quite sufficiently educated, and so she was for the society in which she was, or thought herself, a star, chiefly consisting of the families of the shipowners, coalowners, and the like. She was pretty, with a hectic prettiness of bright eyes and cheeks, and had a following of the young men of the place; and though she always tried to enforce that to receive attentions from a smart young mate, a clerk in an office, a doctor’s assistant, or the like, was a great condescension on her part, she enjoyed them all the more. Learning new songs for their benefit, together with extensive novel reading, were her chief employments, and it was the greater pity because her health was not strong. She dreamt much in a languid way, and had imagination enough to work these tales into her visions of life. Her temper suffered, and Constance found the atmosphere less and less congenial as she grew older and more accustomed to a different life.
She was a gentle, ladylike girl, with her brown hair still on her shoulders, as on that summer Saturday she stood looking along the path, but with her ears listening for sounds from the house, and an anxious expression on her young face. Presently she started at the sound of a gun, which
caused a mighty cawing among the rooks in the trees on the slopes, and a circling of the black creatures in the sky. A whistling then was heard, and her brother Herbert came in sight in a few minutes more, a fine tall youth of sixteen, with quite the air and carriage of a gentleman. He had a gun on his shoulder, and carried by the claws the body of a rook with white wings.
‘Oh, Herbert,’ cried Constance in dismay, ‘did you shoot that by mistake?’
‘No; Stanhope would not believe there was such a crittur, and betted half a sov that it was a cram.’
‘But how could you? Our uncle and aunt thought so much of that poor dear Whitewing, and Best was told to take care of it. They will be so vexed.’
‘Nonsense! He’ll come to more honour stuffed than ever he would flying and howling up there. When I’ve shown him to Stanhope, I shall make that old fellow at Colbeam come down handsomely for him. What a row those birds kick up! I’ll send my other barrel among them.’
‘Oh no, don’t, Bertie. Uncle Frank has one of his dreadful headaches to-day.’
‘Seems to me he is made of headaches.’