The girl’s smile of sweetness changed to one of amusement as she repeated, in a gentle voice through which ran a thread of suffering,
“Come in, sir, please. My uncle’s name is Joseph Polwarth, and this is the gate to Osterfield Park. People know it as the Park-gate.”
The house was not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles and peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage, with a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished eyebrows over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the front of it were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in summer it must be covered with roses.
Wingfold entered at once, and followed her through the kitchen, upon which the door immediately opened, a bright place, with stone floor, and shining things on the walls, to a neat little parlour, cozy and rather dark, with a small window to the garden behind, and a smell of last year’s roses.
“My uncle will be here in a few minutes,” she said, placing a chair for him. “I would have had a fire here, but my uncle always talks better amongst his books. He expected you, but my lord’s steward sent for him up to the new house.”
He took the chair she offered him, and sat down to wait. He had not much of the gift of making talk—a questionable accomplishment,—and he never could approach his so-called inferiors but as his equals, the fact being that in their presence he never felt any difference. Notwithstanding his ignorance of the lore of Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to some things, gifted with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity. Many of the distinctions and privileges after which men follow, and of the annoyances and slights over which they fume, were to the curate inappreciable: he did not and could not see them.
“So you are warders of the gate here, Miss Polwarth?” he said, assuming that to be her name, and rightly, when the young woman, who had for a moment left the room, returned.
“Yes,” she answered, “we have kept it now for about eight years, sir.—It is no hard task. But I fancy there will be a little more to do when the house is finished.”
“It is a long way for you to go to church.”
“It would be, sir; but I do not go,” she said.