"Good-bye."
He was soon away up the hill. I stared him out of sight. He turned round once.
I turned home, pleased and excited at the new life given to an old player in the drama of Me. He was a kind and interesting looking human-being, with this rare and all-important merit that he liked me. I felt this keenly every time he looked at me. I turned over in my mind whether I should tell Grandmother and decided not to. After all the Stranger had said he would write to her: was it not better that she should learn of it from him? For this letter I waited.
Another letter received by my Grandmother soon put all thought of the Stranger at the back of my head.
One day at breakfast she read us a letter from no less a person than the sixth Lord Tawborough, lord of Woolthy Hall. The writer stated that his love for his old governess, reinforced by the wishes of his late revered father, induced him (now that he had come back to Devonshire to live) to hope to make the acquaintance of her mother; the more especially as she had been wronged by one connected by kinship with the family and whom she had first met in his father's house—his house. Would Mrs. Lee be courteous enough to name a day on which it would be convenient for him to call?
I was all attention. Now I should meet a person who had played a part in my mother's life, the little boy who had been kind to her. There was a debt to be paid here, as much as to any one who had been kind to my own self. How I should pay back I could not yet decide. A lord! Mary recompense a lord!
As I thus reflected Aunt Jael was weighing up whether she would accord permission to His Lordship to enter her house.
"Wull, let him come. Maybe he thinks he's honouring us. Let him know a day on which he may call? The Lord's Day! He can come to Meeting and learn that there's a bit of difference between his high position before men and his wretched position before his Maker. Let him come. I approve."
So did my Grandmother, whom natural instinct, religion, and the sobering experience of seventy years' sisterhood had combined to teach that it was not worth while pointing out that it was to her that Lord Tawborough had written, or that the house too was equally hers, inasmuch as one seventeen-pounds-ten-shillings is quite as good as another.
"Very well, Lord's Day after next. I will ask him to come about ten o'clock. If he wants to, he will make the time suit."