“Mamma! did you draw that? You! Did you know about our ancestor?” cried Kate, open-mouthed.
“Oh yes, my dear, I was very fond of drawing when I was young. I was glad to marry into a family with a hero in it,” she added half to herself.
“Let me show it to Eva! Why, she drew a picture of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in prison!”
Eva duly admired the drawing, and showed her own; and behold there was a crack in the ice. The new games, introduced by the Silthorpe cousins, in which drawing, verse-making, and odds and ends of knowledge came into play, proved old ones to Mrs Kingsworth. She was drawn into the circle of young people, and became a leading spirit; with twice as many ideas as Emberance, and four times as much faculty as Kate, she could laugh and argue and hold her own amid the merry clatter, and when Kate listened amazed she recollected that an attempt to teach her some of these little amusements had been scouted as “making play into lessons.” How handsome her mother looked as she puzzled them all or triumphantly penetrated their puzzles.
“Take my word for it, my dear fellow,” said Mr Kingsworth to his son, on one occasion, “Mrs George Kingsworth is worth all the young ladies together.”
Of course Walter took the line of laughing at the heroism and crying down the heroes; but he by no means avoided either the games or the discussions, and Kate and he became more and more friendly and cousinly, till she began to derive opinions from him and think they were her own, while Major Clare was driven into a very small corner of her mind indeed. She soon learned to take a proper interest in the cathedral, and would have been very much surprised to be reminded of her original preference for a shop.
It was impossible that she should forget her former attempt at consulting Walter, and though he avoided the subject, her perceptions were not acute enough to discover this. One afternoon as they walked up and down the Canon’s garden, admiring the spring green of the trees against the grey walls that shut them in, she said,—
“I have thought about Kingsworth every day since that time last year; but I cannot decide the matter yet.”
“I wish Kingsworth did not belong to you, Katharine, that you had no concern with it,” said Walter, abruptly.
“Ah—why? You think—it ought not to belong to me?”