The cottage was to be let, but until a tenant was found, Larrie was compelled to stay there with the baby and Peggie who had thrown in her fortunes with the child, and regarded her master and mistress as being for the time [p 134] ]of unsound mind. She treated Larrie with cold severity, and no words could express the scorn she felt for the absent Dot. But on the baby, she lavished all the tenderness of her nature, and told it half-a-dozen times a day that it was a poor deserted lamb, and if she was the law she would handcuff ‘them two’ so fast together they could not move apart the rest of their lives.
The third day of Dot’s residence at the house, Mr Wooster came. He had called at the cottage, but Peggie had informed him her mistress was up at the house. So he turned his steps uphill. Dot talked a great deal and seemed in an excited mood, but he had no suspicion of the real state of affairs, and merely thought she was spending the afternoon at her mother’s.
But he was staying in the district again for his health, and when he came the next evening with a promised book for the little mother, she was there again.
She was sitting at a table with a quantity of paper books and maps spread out before her.
[p 135]
]‘I am deciding which way to go home,’ she said, in answer to his questioning glance, ‘you have often said I ought to study in Italy.’
He thought she was doing it for a pleasant mental recreation and only smiled.
‘We go in about a month. Did not mother tell you?’ she said, and followed up a dotted line through the Red Sea with a careful pen.
He looked the surprise he felt. So friendly had he become with Dot and the little mother, that he felt quite hurt to be so tardily informed.
‘Mr Armitage is fortunate to be able to get away,’ was all he said and there was a little stiffness in his voice.
Dot went slowly overland from Brindisi to Calais, then she looked up.