“I think we can do without it. Do you want to keep your private fortune to yourself? You know married women have no property. I shall be able to despoil you of your fortune, unless you tie it up very tightly!”
“Don’t tease, Arthur,” she answered; “do be serious, for I am really in earnest. I don’t want the money for myself. I would rather take everything from you. But I want to do some good with it. I should like to use it for some special purpose.”
“What sort of purpose, dearest?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I must think. I want to make people happy. Some have such sad lives always. It hardly seems fair. Oh, I know what I should like best!—to take a dear little cottage, and have a nice woman there to look after things, and to bring poor children down from London for a month at a time, to give them a real holiday and outing. Oh, yes, that would be lovely! and little Allumette should be the first. Do you remember that pretty little model Cora had for her picture? She was a dear little thing, and I told her she should come into the country one day. I would have her for the first of the children. Don’t you think it would be a delightful plan?”
“It might; but some of those delightful plans sound better than they work out. No, no, don’t look so crestfallen, my Madge; I am not throwing cold water. On the contrary, I will help you all I can. And, by-the-by, not far from here is a very pleasant and roomy old farmhouse, which is going to be empty at Michaelmas. It is only a small one for a farm, but it might serve your purpose, and I daresay you could coax my father to let you have it rent free. He wants to take the land and throw it into the home farm which it adjoins, as small farms don’t pay now, and the tenant is giving up. The house might do very well for some purpose of that sort. Would you like to go and see it?”
Madge was eager to do so, and was delighted with the place when she got there. It was a small farmstead, picturesque and overgrown with creepers, with a tumble-down old barn that would make an ideal playroom for children on wet days, and a tangled orchard full of gnarled old apple trees just going out of bloom, a duck pond, a nut walk, and fields and copses all round.
The house was quaint and fairly roomy, and Madge was enchanted with the flagged kitchen, the dormer windows, and the little odd stairs up and down at every turn.
“Oh, Arthur!—it would be a sweet place for them to come to—poor little darlings! I should like to see little Allumette’s face when she was set down at the gate. Michaelmas, did you say? That will be after we are married, and if I had arranged about a woman, we could have a few little things down in October, could we not? The nuts would be ripe then, and you know how lovely the trees are through October. And on wet days there would be the old barn. It would be delightful, would it not, Arthur? And for little children from London no doing up of the house would be needed. It would be better not too spick and span. Just a few beds and chairs and tables. Oh, I could see to everything like that, and tell little Allumette that she should be the first visitor. Perhaps I would let her introduce me to some friends of hers, and bring them all down together.”
Madge was so full of delight with her new scheme that she could talk of nothing else all the evening with Eva and Cora.
They were both quite pleased and interested in the plan.