Yet this had not been such a joyful home-coming as it ought to have been. In all confidence she had set out to find the home which she had only twice visited, each time for a day or two, on some tour with her guardians, since, at six years of age, she had been brought away by her Aunt Emily, a motherless and fatherless child. Those visits had both been paid while she was still under fourteen, before Otho had left college and taken possession. Otho was six years her senior, and had pursued his public school course and got through his college career while she was yet in the schoolroom and in short frocks. Occasionally, when he had been in town, or anywhere near them, he had paid her a flying visit; had once, when they had been in the Highlands, spent a few days with them, to shoot grouse with his uncle and cousin Paul. On these occasions he had told her that she grew a fine girl (fancying it was a nice kind of thing to say to a sister, though when he said “fine” he meant “tall,” and had taken so little real notice of her, that he had spoken in all good faith when describing her to Magdalen the week before). And he had uniformly discouraged the idea of her coming to live at Thorsgarth (it had never been seriously broached before), saying, whenever allusion had been made to such a thing, ‘Oh, you will never want a home there. You will be married before that.’
But Eleanor had not married, and she had come to Thorsgarth to make her home there.
‘Is this all the town there is, Otho?’ she asked, suddenly, as they emerged from the street into the open road. ‘I’ve almost forgotten it. What an odd, little, gray, weather-beaten place it is! Not a bit like the south.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I feel as if I’d never been here, and I hardly ever meet any one who has. It looks bleak here; that’s what I mean.’
‘Well, it is,’ said Otho, vexed with such a persistent talk about the looks of a place. As if it mattered what Bradstane looked like! ‘And it’s November, too. You can’t expect roses in November.’
‘But I’ve always had them. There were Dijon roses growing over the south walls at Brinswell when I left. You remember Brinswell, Otho?’
‘Yes, I do; and a dull hole it was.’
‘Not any duller than Thorsgarth, I should fancy. It was as lovely a place as ever I saw. We were more there and less in London the last few years. Of course I like London, but I never felt dull at Brinswell. What fruit and flowers! Of course, things can’t grow here as they did there. The trees look so small and stunted.’
‘Small! Why, the Bradstane ash-trees are noted all through the country-side.’