Her voice never gave any hint of inverted commas, and Frances looked at her with large, surprised eyes.
Miss Blandflower was thin and sandy, with eyeglasses, and might have been of any age between thirty-four and forty. She several times glanced affectionately at Mrs. Tregaskis, and said, “A sight for sore eyes, as they say,” and then flung a nervous look at Frederick, who remained silent.
After tea Rosamund and Frances were shown the garden, where Cousin Bertha had turned a piece of rough ground into a tennis court, and made a herbaceous border and two rockeries, and the stables, where Cousin Bertha proposed personally to conduct the clipping of the mare Jenny, on the morrow, and where she slapped Jenny’s hind-quarters with a heartiness that violently disconcerted both children, unused to animals of any description.
They were also taken over the little dairy, where Cousin Bertha superintended the making of cheese and butter and cream which, she assured them, to their utter bewilderment, “paid,” and where she also weekly instructed a class of girls from the neighbouring farms. They were shown the chickens, bred and kept and fed, and, Frances supposed in her utter ignorance of the expert language employed by her cousin, doubtless hatched by Cousin Bertha, and the little orchard where Cousin Bertha had planted a variety of small apple-trees, most of which she indicated by name.
Hazel came with them, and gazed compassionately at the obviously bewildered pair.
“Haven’t you got a dairy and chickens and a horse at your home?” she asked Rosamund, who replied darkly:
“No. We don’t understand about those sort of things. We had books and a garden, and two cats with kittens, at home.”
“Well, this home will give you something new!” declared her guardian with undiminished brightness, although Rosamund’s tone had been far indeed from expressing enthusiasm for “those sort of things.”
“We had a most beautiful piano,” said Frances to Hazel. “It was so good that it was called the Grand Piano, and nobody ever touched it except——”
She stopped and coloured.