“To Brussels.”
“Where is Brussels?”
“I believe, miss, that it is the capital of Belgium.”
Mildred tore open the letter, which Bell read aloud over the child’s shoulder.
“I hope you won’t be grieved at losing your playfellow, my dearest pet. Fay is dreadfully backward in her education, and has no manners. She has gone to a finishing-school at Brussels, and you may not see her again for some years.”
And so the years go by, and this story passes on to a time when the child Mildred is a child no more, but the happy mother of a fair young daughter, and the wife of an idolised husband.
CHAPTER V.
WITHOUT THE WOLF.
“Father,” said Lola, “there are ever so many people in the village ill with fever. Isn’t it sad?”
Mr. and Mrs. Greswold, of Enderby Manor, had been submitting to a fortnight’s dissipation in London, and this was their first Sunday at home after that interval. They had returned late on the previous night, and house and gardens had all the sweetness and freshness of a scene to which one is restored after absence. They had spent the summer morning in the little village church with their daughter; and now they were enjoying the leisure interval between church and luncheon.
George Greswold sat in a lounging-chair under a cedar within twenty yards of the dining-room windows, and Lola was hanging about him as he read the Athenæum, caressing him with little touches of light hands upon his hair or his coat-collar, adoring him with all her might after the agony of severance.