There was a brief silence. Even the children on the hearthrug were dumb, and there was no sound but the contented purring of Hetty’s colossal cat, a brindled grey, with a fluffy white breast, a cat that was satiated with the worship of pretty girls, and gave himself as many airs as if he had been kittened in Egypt, and ranked among gods.
“Dear as Beverley was, I hope you all like your Sussex home,” said Vansittart.
“Sussex is well enough, but when one is used to a big stone house, with a picture-gallery, and one of the finest Jacobean staircases in the East Riding, it is rather hard to come down to a labourer’s cottage that has been dodged and expanded into the most inconvenient house in the neighbourhood,” said Sophy, with a grand air, and tilting her retroussé nose a little higher than usual.
Again the girls on the hearthrug burst into inextinguishable laughter.
“What a snob you are, Sophy!” cried the outspoken Hetty. “You say all that as if you had learnt it by heart; and as for coming down, you came down to the labourer’s cottage when you were eleven years old. You ought to be used to it now you are twenty.”
Twenty. Sophy, the second, was twenty—and there was only a year between her and Vansittart’s incomparable she, who had migrated to Sussex when she was twelve. One and twenty, in the fair majority of her girlish charms. He thought it the most delightful period in woman’s life—fair as in her teens, but wiser: mature for love and wisdom.
All earthly blisses must end. The blissfullest five o’clock tea cannot last for ever; but Vansittart was determined to make this endure as long as he could. The meal was finished. Even those long, lean hands of the youngsters had ceased to be stretched harpy-like towards the table for more bread and jam, or another slice of cake, which an elder sister dispensed with somewhat offensive comments upon the ravenous maw of youth.
“Oh, come now,” cried the offended Peggy. “Suppose I do eat a lot; I haven’t stopped growing yet. You have, yet I’ve heard you say you could sit and eat one of Nancy’s plum-loaves all the evening. But that was when there was no one here but ourselves.”
Sophy blushed furiously, and Vansittart came laughingly to the rescue.
“I can vouch for the seductiveness of Nancy’s plum-loaf,” he said. “I think I must coax her to impart the recipe to my mother’s cook. Is your Nancy a coaxable person?”