The car was a very fine one, but it carried only a chauffeur and a basket of primroses. They parted company at the door. Priscilla heard the man speaking a word or two to the maid at the hall door, and the machine was backed slowly in the segment of a circle away from the house to put it into position for taking the hill properly.
“Mrs. Pearce has told him who we were, and he found the baskets in the porch,” were the words that came to her mind at that moment.
And then she gave a little start, and it was followed by a little laugh, and then a little frown.
It had suddenly occurred to her that here was a basket of flowers sent by a kindly hand as a conventional tribute of respect; only it was impossible that any such sentiment should be pinned to it, written on paper with a black border.
Still, there was the obituary notice in that newspaper on the table, and there was the basket of flowers—they could easily be worked into a wreath.
The maid brought them into the room and laid them on a chair.
CHAPTER VIII
Of course the next day some of the London newspapers contained ample, though by no means extravagant, reports of the wreck of the barque on the coast of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. They had previously published cables to the same effect, but only to the extent of a hundred words. At that time no more interest was attached to the incident than would be associated with the wreck of an ordinary vessel. It was not until the arrival of the Canadian papers that it was found that there was a popular feature in the transaction. The public mind, always deeply stirred by an account of a black-sheep hero, could not be ignored by the newspapers; and in recognition of this fact, several columns in the aggregate and a few sub-leaders appeared dealing with the attempt—a successful attempt too—made by Marcus Blaydon to make up for the errors of his past by an act of heroism that had cost him his life. Posthumous honour in this form is always administered with a generous hand; and the consequence was that, by the time the country papers had, on account of the local interest attaching to the loss of the barque Kingsdale, filled to overflowing the cup of effervescent incident in this connection, and offered it to their readers, Mr. Wadhurst had come to think of himself as the father-in-law of a hero. He actually had a feeling of pride when he saw his name in the bracketed paragraphs at the foot of the spirited account of the wreck: “It will be remembered that the heroic if unfortunate man, Marcus Blaydon, married on the morning of his arrest, the only daughter of a much-respected practical agriculturist, Mr. Phineas Wadhurst, of Athalsdean, near Framsby.”