And as he spoke, his unwonted buoyancy softened into a quietness of manner more befitting that word "happiness." Strange word! hardly in my vocabulary. Yet, when he uttered it, I seemed to understand it and to be content.
We wound a little way down the slope, and came in front of Rose Cottage. It was well named. I never in my life had seen such a bush of bloom. They hung in clusters—those roses—a dozen in a group; pressing their pinky cheeks together in a mass of family fragrance, pushing in at the parlour window, climbing up even to the very attic. There was a yellow jasmine over the porch at one front door, and a woodbine at the other; the cottage had two entrances, each distinct. But the general impression it gave, both as to sight and scent, was of roses—nothing but roses.
"How are you, Mrs. Tod?" as a comely, middle-aged body appeared at the right-hand doorway, dressed sprucely in one of those things Jael called a "coat and jacket," likewise a red calamanco petticoat tucked up at the pocket-holes.
"I be pretty fair, sir—be you the same? The children ha' not forgotten you—you see, Mr. Halifax."
"So much the better!" and he patted two or three little white heads, and tossed the youngest high up in the air. It looked very strange to see John with a child in his arms.
"Don't 'ee make more noise than 'ee can help, my lad," the good woman said to our post-boy, "because, sir, the sick gentleman bean't so well again to-day."
"I am sorry for it. We would not have driven up to the door had we known. Which is his room?"
Mrs. Tod pointed to a window—not on our side of the house, but the other. A hand was just closing the casement and pulling down the blind—a hand which, in the momentary glimpse we had of it, seemed less like a man's than a woman's.
When we were settled in the parlour John noticed this fact.
"It was the wife, most likely. Poor thing! how hard to be shut up in-doors on such a summer evening as this!"