CHAPTER XX
Rupert Haverford came back from America about the beginning of October. He went down immediately to Yelverton.
The children were still with Mrs. Brenton—that is to say, they had gone for a brief while to stay with their mother; but the visit had not been a success, and Camilla herself proposed that she should make some arrangement to let the little folk stay for a few months longer under Mrs. Brenton's care.
"You see, we haven't got a house yet," she said; "nothing would induce Cuthbert to live in the house his mother left him. We must get that off our hands before we settle ourselves in another, and then I think we shall go to the Riviera this winter. He has several portraits that he wants to paint there."
Once, with a laugh, she had said—
"I have two minds to ask Rupert to lend us that big house of his. It is absurd to shut it up for months at a time when we are homeless."
It was, therefore, as much on the children's account as anything else that Haverford went to Yelverton.
Nevertheless, he found himself travelling down to Mrs. Brenton's comfortable house with a sense of eagerness that was half pleasure.
The reason for his visit to the States had not been wrongly reported; chance had brought to his knowledge the fact that there were some connections of Matthew Woolgar settled in America—humble, struggling people to whom money would be a godsend.
He spent at least a couple of months before he came across a trace of these people, and then, to his disappointment, found that the family had dwindled to two old people, who were quite unfit to take the voyage to England, and for whom little was possible except placing them in comfortable circumstances.