“Well, some day,” replied Barbara discreetly.
A few hours later, Barbara and Clare were standing at the door of a small, neat cottage in a country lane, where dwelt Barbara’s sister, Marian Pendexter, (a fictitious person) widow of the village schoolmaster. The door was opened by Marian herself, a woman some five years the senior of her sister, to whom she bore a good deal of likeness, but Marian was the quieter mannered and the more silent of the two.
“Marry, little Mistress Clare!” was her smiling welcome. “Come in, prithee, little Mistress, and thou shalt have a buttered cake to thy four-hours. Give thee good even, Bab.”
A snowy white cloth covered the little round table in the cottage, and on it were laid a loaf of bread a piece of butter, and a jug of milk. In honour of her guests, Marian went to her cupboard, and brought out a mould of damson cheese, a bowl of syllabub, and a round tea-cake, which she set before the fire to toast.
“And how fareth good Master Avery?” asked Marian, as she closed the cupboard door, and came back.
Barbara shook her head ominously.
“But ill, forsooth?” pursued her sister.
“Marry, an’ you ask at him, he is alway well; but—I carry mine eyes, Marian.”
Barbara’s theory of educating children was to keep them entirely ignorant of the affairs of their elders. To secure this end, she adopted a vague, misty style of language, of which she fondly imagined that Clare did not understand a word. The result was unfortunate, as it usually is. Clare understood detached bits of her nurse’s conversation, over which she brooded silently in her own little mind, until she evolved a whole story—a long way off the truth. It would have done much less harm to tell her the whole truth at once; for the fact of a mystery being made provoked her curiosity, and her imaginations were far more extreme than the facts.
“Ah, he feeleth the lack of my mistress his wife, I reckon,” said Marian pityingly. “She must be soothly a sad miss every whither.”