* * * * *
Oh, dear, dear, how unkind of you, baby! You needn’t have woke up just as I’ve got a few minutes to myself. All right, dear, mamma’s coming. Bless his big blue eyes! Oh, he is so like Harry!
CHAPTER II.
THE SQUIRE’S ROOM.
After we got into our new house everything was very strange at first. Harry knew something about the business, having been with a relative, who was in the same line, for six months that he didn’t go to sea; but to me it was something quite new.
We took on the people who had been with the late owners, and that was a great help to us—one girl, the barmaid, being a very nice young woman, and a great comfort to me, telling me many things quietly that prevented me looking foolish through not knowing.
She was about four-and-twenty, and rather pretty; Miss Ward her name was, and she didn’t mind turning her hand to anything, and would help me about the house, and was quite a companion to me. She said she was very glad we had taken the place, because she hadn’t been comfortable with the people who had left it. The master was all right, but his wife was very stuck up, having been the daughter of a Government clerk, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with the business, saying it was lowering, and only dressed herself up and sat in her own room, and read novels, and wanted everybody about the place to attend on her instead of the customers, and was very proud and haughty if any of them said “Good evening, mum,” to her, hardly having a civil word for them, though it was their money she dressed herself up on.
She and her husband were going to have a real hotel instead of an inn, she having come into money, which was why we got the place so cheap.
Certainly it was left beautifully clean, that I will say; and there was an air of gentility about the place that was comforting. When Harry had first talked about going into this sort of business I felt rather nervous. My idea of an inn was a place where there were quarrels and fights, and where you had to put people out, and where wives came crying about ten o’clock to fetch their husbands home.
But I felt quite easy in my mind as soon as we were settled down in the ‘Stretford Arms,’ and very nice and cosy it was of an evening in our parlour, with three or four nice respectable people sitting and smoking, and Harry, “the landlord” (dear me, how funny it was to hear him called “landlord” at first!), smoking his pipe with them, and me doing my needlework. Every now and then Harry would have to get up and go into the bar, to help Miss Ward, and say a word or two to the customers, but they were all respectable people; and the light and the warmth and the comfort made a nice dozy, contented, sleek feeling come over me.
I don’t know what made me think it, but the first night in our little parlour I felt as if I ought to purr, because I felt just as I should think a cat must feel when she settles down comfortably in front of the fire, on that round place that is in the middle of a fender.