‘Would you be very much surprised if you heard that he is the image of me?’
‘Maurice!’
‘I have given you the only wedding gift I had to offer, love—the first fruits of my pen.’
‘Oh, Maurice, is it really me? Have I married a poet?’
‘You have married something better, dear; an honest man, who loves you with all his strength, and heart, and mind.’
Three years later and Maurice’s fame as a poet is an established fact, a fact that grows and widens with time. Mr. and Mrs. Clissold have built themselves a summer residence, a house of the Swiss châlet order, near Borcel End, where Muriel lives her quiet life, her father’s placid companion, harmless, tranquil, only what Phœbe the housemaid calls ‘a little odd in her ways.’
Justina and Viola Bellingham are fast friends, much to the delight of Martin Trevanard, who contrives somehow to be always at hand during Viola’s visits to the châlet. He breaks in a pair of Iceland ponies for that lady’s phaeton, and makes himself generally useful. He is Viola’s adviser upon all agricultural matters, and has quite given up that old idea of establishing himself in London. He rides to hounds every season, and sometimes has the honour of showing Miss Bellingham the way—an easy way, for the most part, through gates, and convenient gaps in hedges.
The old-fashioned neighbours who admired Martin’s mother as the model of housewives, indulge in sundry animadversions upon the young man’s scarlet coat and Plymouth-made top-boots, and predict that Martin will never be so good a farmer as his father: a prophecy hardly justified by facts, for Martin has wrought many improvements at Borcel by a judicious outlay. The trustees of the estate have renewed Michael’s tenancy on a lease of three lives, which will in all probability secure the farm to the house of Trevanard for the next half-century.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Clissold have set up their nursery by this time, an institution people set up with far less consideration than they give to the establishment of a carriage and pair, but which is the more costly luxury of the two; and nurses and ladies at the châlet are sworn allies with the young Squire and his nurse from the Manor House, where Viola is mistress. Sir Nugent Bellingham comes to Cornwall once in three months for a week or so, yawns tremendously all the time, looks at accounts which he doesn’t in the least understand, and goes back to his clubs and the stony-hearted streets with infinite relief.