She sate herself down, as if oppressed by her curiosity as to all the five-and-twenty years that had passed since she had seen my mother. Her daughter Phillis took up her knitting—a man’s long grey worsted stocking, I remember—and knitted away without looking at her work. I felt that the steady gaze of those deep grey eyes was upon me, though once, when I stealthily raised mine to hers, she was examining something on the wall above my head.
When I had answered all my cousin Holman’s questions, she heaved a long breath, and said, “To think of Margaret Moneypenny’s boy being in our house! I wish the minister was here. Phillis, in what field is thy father to-day?”
“In the five-acre; they are beginning to cut the corn.”
“He’ll not like being sent for then, else I should have liked you to have seen the minister. But the five-acre is a good step off. You shall have a glass of wine and a bit of cake before you stir from this house, though. You’re bound to go, you say, or else the minister comes in mostly when the men have their four o’clock.”
“I must go—I ought to have been off before now.”
“Here, then, Phillis, take the keys.” She gave her daughter some whispered directions, and Phillis left the room.
“She is my cousin, is she not?” I asked. I knew she was, but somehow I wanted to talk of her, and did not know how to begin.
“Yes—Phillis Holman. She is our only child—now.”
Either from that “now,” or from a strange momentary wistfulness in her eyes, I knew that there had been more children, who were now dead.
“How old is Cousin Phillis?” said I, scarcely venturing on the new name, it seemed too prettily familiar for me to call her by it; but Cousin Holman took no notice of it, answering straight to the purpose.