She went to Hugh and held out her hand. “Good-bye, Hugh. Please understand,” she said very low.
Hugh took the little gloved hand in his, and read rightly the trouble in her eyes.
“It’s all right—don’t you bother, Syd,” he said. “I understand.”
CHAPTER XII
MERRY CHRISTMAS
“What a lot of times I seem to have said ‘Merry Christmas’ this afternoon!” Sydney remarked as she and Miss Osric went round the village in Sydney’s little pony carriage with the pair of lovely little bay ponies she so much enjoyed driving. “And the sad thing is, that nobody here seems to feel particularly happy,” she went on. “Mrs. Andrews, to whom I took that crossover just now, said—‘It was hard enough to feel joyful when her man was bent double with rheumatism from the dampness of his cottage!’ Miss Osric, are the cottages in very bad repair here? Lord Braemuir seemed to think so, and so do the people who live in them. But when I asked Lady Frederica she said—‘Poor people always grumbled; if it wasn’t one thing, it was sure to be another!’ What do you think?”
Miss Osric hesitated for a little while before replying.
“Well, Sydney,” she said at length, “I don’t know whether I ought to tell you this, but it seems to me right you should know something of the cottages on the estate. It will be your business to know by-and-by. You know my father is chaplain to the hospital at Donisbro’, and he has often told me that the amount of cases coming from the cottages on this estate is appalling. People have been brought to the hospital from Loam and Lislehurst, and even Styles, where the ground is higher, simply crippled with rheumatism, and off and on there have been a good many cases of diphtheria and fever. That doesn’t speak well for the cottages, you know.”
Sydney pulled up the ponies in the middle of the road.