“How strange it is,” Mr. Harper observed. “All these old spots seem to me like places beheld in a dream. Uncle Brian often used to talk about them. I think to this day he remembers everything and everybody about Kingcombe.”
“Does he?”
“And that some day or other he will come back again I do most firmly believe. Do not you, Anne?”
“Yes.” As she spoke, her hand involuntarily was pressed upon her side. Agatha wondered she responded so coldly and with so melancholy a look, to such a joyous prospect as Uncle Brian's return would surely be to all the family.
But here they were in Kingcombe streets—very quiet, sleepy streets, which seemed to have taken an undisturbed doze for a few centuries, to atone for the terrible excitements there created successively by Danish, Roman, Saxon, and baronial ruffians. The poor little town seemed determined to spend its old age in peace and solitude, for you might have planted a cannonade at the market-place, and swept down East Street, West Street, North Street, and South Street, without laying more than a dozen official murders on your soul. There was indeed great reason for Mrs. Harper's innocent inquiry—“Where are all the people gone to?”
“Except on market-days, we rarely see more street passengers than now in Kingcombe,” Aline Valery answered, smiling. “You will get accustomed to that and many other things when you are a country lady. Now, shall we drive to the Dugdales, or look first at the two houses I told you of?”
Mr. Harper preferred the latter course, under fear, his wife merrily declared, of being circumvented by Mrs. Dugdale. The brother and sister, she had already discovered, seemed on as pleasant terms as fire and water, since, as Harrie punningly averred, one invariably “put out” the other. They did not squabble—Nathanael Harper never squabbled—but they always met with a gentle hissing, like water sprinkled on coals. Agatha, who was quite new to these harmless fraternalities, always occurring in large families, was mightily amused thereat.
The first house the little party looked over was, as Emma Thornycroft would have phrased it, “a love of a place!” Dining-room, drawing-rooms, conservatory, gardens—quite a gentleman's mansion. Agatha set her heart upon it at once, and it blotted out even her lingering regret over the lost home in the Regent's Park. She ran over the rooms with the glee of a child, and only came back to her husband to urge him to take it, giving her this thing and that thing necessary to its beautification.
He patted her cheek with a pleased yet sad look.
“Dear, I will give you all I can; be quite sure of that. But”—