“Mother! here is Mistress Barbara Polwhele.”
“Barbara Polwhele!” said a voice in reply,—a voice which Barbara had not heard for nineteen years, yet which time had so little altered that she recognised at once the Thekla Rose of old. And in another moment Mrs Tremayne stood before her.
Her aspect was more changed than her voice. The five terrible years of the Marian persecution had swept over her head in early youth, and their bitter anxieties and forebodings left her, at the age of nineteen, a white, wan, slender, delicate girl. But now a like number of years, spent in calm, happy work, had left their traces also, and Mrs Tremayne looked what she was, a gentle, contented woman of thirty-eight, with more bloom on her cheek than she had ever worn in youth, and the piteous expression of distressed suspense entirely gone from her eyes.
“Eh, Mistress Thekla!” was Barbara’s greeting.
“I be cruel glad to see you. Methinks you be gone so many years younger as you must needs be elder.”
“Nay, truly, for I were then but a babe in the cradle,” was the laughing answer. “Thou art a losenger (flatterer), Barbara.”
“In very deed,” returned Barbara inconsistently, “I could have known you any whither.”
“And me also?” demanded another voice, as a little lively old lady trotted out of the room which Mrs Tremayne had just left. “Shouldst thou have known me any whither, Barbara Polwhele?”
“Marry La’kin! if ’tis not Mistress Rose!” (Name fact, character fictitious.)
“Who but myself? I dwell with Thekla since I am widow. And I make the cakes, as Arthur knows,” added Mrs Rose, cheerily, patting her grandson’s head; “but if I should go hence, there should be a famine, ma foi!”