A few minutes later Robina rang the dinner bell. Edmund and his aunt descended the curly staircase together, hand in hand.
"I told her I was sorry," he announced to Mr. Wycherly, who was waiting at the dining-room door that Miss Esperance might pass in first. "I'm going to church zis afternoon. I'm going," he added gleefully, "becos' zere's ducks for dinner."
CHAPTER XII
THE VILLAGE
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
POPE.
"Our society may be small but it is extremely select," Miss Maggie Moffat used to say on such occasions as friends from the South-side of Edinburgh used to visit her.
"It is what we have always sought after," Miss Jeanie, her sister, would chime in. "Quality not quantity, and nowhere could we have found superior quality if we had gone over the whole of the British Isles to look for it."
None of the earlier inhabitants of Burnhead ever quite fathomed how or why the Misses Moffat had come to live there. The fact remained, however, that one term day they had taken a small house in the middle of the village street: a house that had been empty for many years. Its original name was "Rowan Cottage," because there was a rowan tree in the back garden, but when the Misses Moffat took it they persuaded the landlord to change the name to "Rowan Lodge," the only lodge in the neighbourhood save that which guarded the entrance at Lady Alicia's drive gate. The name was painted on the front of the house in large, clear characters, and it looked, the Misses Moffat thought, extremely well on the pink note-paper with scalloped edges which they affected in their correspondence.
They were ladies of uncertain age; that is to say, of the kind of age to which direct reference is never made.
They were not serenely and beautifully old like Miss Esperance, nor sturdily and frankly middle-aged like Lady Alicia, and by no stretch of imagination could they be considered young like Bonnie Margaret. They were, as they themselves would have put it, "of a quite suitable age for matrimony, not giddy girls, you understand, but nice, sensible, douce young women."