The little child’s crying was hushed; big tears hung in its great wondering eyes, and the little face looked up pale and forlorn. It was a gaze that lasted while you might count four or five. But its mysterious work of love was done. “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”
Squire Fairfield walked round this room, and went out and examined the others, and went downstairs in silence, and when he was going out at the hall-door he stopped and looked at old Dulcibella Crane, who stood courtesying at it in great fear, and said he—
“The child’ll be better at home wi’ me, up at Wyvern, and I’ll send down for it and you in the afternoon, till—something’s settled.”
And on this invitation little Alice Maybell and her nurse, Dulcibella Crane, came to Wyvern Manor, and had remained there now for twenty years.
CHAPTER V.
THE TERRACE GARDEN.
Alice Maybell grew up very pretty; not a riant beauty, without much colour, rather pale, indeed, and a little sad. What struck one at first sight was a slender figure, with a prettiness in every motion. A clear-tinted oval face, with very large dark gray eyes, such as Chaucer describes in his beauties as “ey-es gray as glass,” with very long lashes; her lips of a very brilliant red, with even little teeth, and when she smiled a great many tiny soft dimples.
This pretty creature led a lonely life at Wyvern. Between her and the young squires, Charles and Henry, there intervened the great gulf of twenty years, and she was left very much to herself.
Sometimes she rode into the village with the old Squire; she sat in the Wyvern pew every Sunday; but except on those and like occasions, the townsfolk saw little of her.
“’Taint after her father or mother she takes with them airs of hers; there was no pride in the Vicar or poor Mrs. Maybell, and she’ll never be like her mother, a nice little thing she was.”
So said Mrs. Ford of the “George” Inn at Wyvern—but what she called pride was in reality shyness.