"You have been very kind to me," she said. "Good night."
"I am afraid Lucy would say I had not 'stood up' to him enough," she thought. "But all he wanted was to dissect me, and I hope he has done it satisfactorily. What a curious man he is! I wonder if any one ever took quite that view of the subject before? Not at all the view of a Sir Galahad, I fancy"—and she thought of a passage that had puzzled her in Rhoda Fleming—"but he was kind to me, and honest with me, and I like him. I must try very hard not to become unconsciously 'blunted' as he calls it."
Her eye fell on a letter from her cousin, and she sat down in her rocking-chair, cast a regretful glance at the withered maidenhairs on her shoulder, and tore open the envelope.
"MY DEAR COUSIN,—Your letter has just come in, and very good news it is. All the world looks brighter since I read it. I will do my best to make you happy, and although you will have plenty of time to yourself, you will be of the greatest use to me. Both in the house and in the shop——"
"Good God!" said Mona; and letting the letter fall, she buried her face in her hands.
CHAPTER V.
"AN AGATE KNIFE-EDGE."
It is doubtful whether Mona had ever received such a shock in the whole course of her life.
She had always been told, and she had gloried in the knowledge, that her father's father was a self-made man; but the very fact that she did thus glory was a proof, perhaps in more ways than one, that the process of "making" had been a very complete one. She vaguely knew, but she did not in the least realise, what people may be before they are "made." She had taken for granted, as she told Lucy, that her cousin Rachel was "not exactly what one would call a lady;" but she had unconsciously pictured to herself a pretty cottage embowered in roses, a simple primitive life, early dinners, occasional afternoon calls, rare tea-parties, and abundant leisure for walking, reading, thinking, and dreaming on the rocks. Her love for the sea, and especially for the wild east coast, amounted almost to a passion, which hitherto she had had but little opportunity of gratifying; and this love, perhaps, had weighed with her as much as anything else, in the decision she had made.
She had talked with pride of the "good old yeoman blood" in her veins, but principle and dainty nurture shrank alike from the idea of the middleman—the shop.