“What did your people say?”
“They will not have anything to do with us. They had a sort of family council when they heard I was married, and cut us off altogether.”
Helen began to pace up and down the room. “My good boy, what a mess!” she said gently. “Who are your people?”
He could answer this. His parents, who were dead, had been in trade; his sisters had married commercial travellers; his brother was a lay-reader.
“And your grandparents?”
Leonard told her a secret that he had held shameful up to now. “They were just nothing at all,” he said, “—agricultural labourers and that sort.”
“So! From which part?”
“Lincolnshire mostly, but my mother’s father—he, oddly enough, came from these parts round here.”
“From this very Shropshire. Yes, that is odd. My mother’s people were Lancashire. But why do your brother and your sisters object to Mrs. Bast?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”