"What's the use of going on about fishermen's cottages, Lotta?" Mrs.
Sheldon demanded, peevishly. "Fishermen's cottages won't provide us with
butcher's meat. Where are we to get your little bit of roast mutton? Dr.
Doddleson laid such a stress upon the roast mutton."
"The sea-air will do me more good than all the mutton that ever was roasted at Eton, mamma. O, dear, is this our farmhouse?" cried Charlotte, as the vehicle drew up at a picturesque gate. "O, what a love of a house! what diamond-paned windows! what sweet white curtains! and a cow staring at me quite in the friendliest way across the gate! O, can we be so happy as to live here?"
"Diana," cried Mrs. Sheldon, in a solemn voice, "not a single shop have we passed—not so much as a post-office! And as to haberdashery, I'm sure you might be reduced to rags in this place before you could get so much as a yard of glazed lining!"
The farmhouse was one of those ideal homesteads which, to the dweller in cities, seems fair as the sapphire-ceiled chambers of the house of Solomon. Charlotte was enraptured by the idea that this was to be her home for the next fortnight.
"I wish it could be for ever, Di," she said, as the two girls were inspecting the rustic, dimity-draperied, lavender-and-rose-leaf-perfumed bedchambers. "Who would wish to go back to prim suburban Bayswater after this? Valentine and I could lodge here after our marriage. It is better than Wimbledon. Grand thoughts would come to him with the thunder of the stormy waves; and on calm bright days like this the rippling water would whisper pretty fancies into his ear. Why, to live here would make any one a poet. I think I could write a novel myself, if I lived here long enough."
After this they arranged the pretty sitting-room, and placed an easy-chair by the window for Charlotte, an arm-chair opposite this for Mrs. Sheldon, and between the two a little table for the fancy work and books and flowers, and all the small necessities of feminine existence. And then—while Mrs. Sheldon prowled about the rooms, and discovered so many faults and made so many objections as to give evidence of a fine faculty for invention unsuspected in her hitherto—Charlotte and Diana explored the garden and peeped at the farmyard, where the friendly cow still stared over the white gate, just as she had stared when the fly came to a stop, as if she had not yet recovered from the astonishment created in her pastoral mind by that phenomenal circumstance. And then Charlotte was suddenly tired, and there came upon her that strange dizziness which was one of her most frequent symptoms. Diana led her immediately back to the house, and established her comfortably in her easy-chair.
"I must be very ill," she said, plaintively; "for even the novelty of this pretty place cannot make me happy long."
* * * * *
Mr. Sheldon arrived in the evening, bringing with him a supply of that simple medicine which Charlotte took three times a day. He had remembered that there was no dispensing chemist at Harold's Hill, and that it would be necessary to send to St. Leonards for the medicine, and had therefore brought with him a double quantity of the mild tonic.
"It was very kind of you to think of it, though I really don't believe the stuff does me any good," said Charlotte. "Nancy Woolper used to get it for me at Bayswater. She made quite a point of fetching it from the chemist's herself."