Love Lane.
Emberance, meanwhile, had been welcomed home with great warmth by her mother and aunt, who had both missed her cheerful young presence, and set herself energetically to take up all her broken threads, and resume the little duties that had been interrupted by her long visit. Emberance taught at a Sunday school, and helped to manage a lending library, and a working party, besides ruling despotically over the caps and other ornaments of her mother and aunt, and being a leading spirit at a choral class in the neighbourhood.
She felt dull when she first came back; but she had too much sense and too much management of herself to fret and dawdle like poor Kate; there was no use, she thought, in thinking more of Malcolm than could be helped.
Her mother was disappointed at finding her so unaltered. She had vaguely hoped that “something might happen” to her daughter during her long absence, and when she could not gather that Emberance had received any offers, and seemed to take up her old life just where she left it, she hazarded a hint.
“At any rate, Emberance, I suppose the society you met at Kingsworth was very superior to the Fanchester set,—of course excepting the cathedral.”
“Well, yes,—in some ways perhaps; but we went out very little.”
“I dare say the young men were of a different stamp from any you could meet here?”
“They were more in the style of Mr Mackenzie,” said Emberance with a flush, which was a literal falsehood, however true in spirit; for neither Walter Kingsworth, nor Major Clare, nor Alfred Deane were at all in the style of her grave young Scot.
“Ah, you might forget that romance, for young Mackenzie is never likely to do much—”
“How do you know, mother,—have you heard?” cried Emberance eagerly.