Adela started up; the blush-rose on her cheek deepening to a rich damask.
"I—I am afraid I forgot all about them, Aunt Margery. I can't find them."
Miss Upton walked to the further end of the large room, opened the drawer of a small table, and took out the glasses.
"Oh," said Adela, repentantly; "it was in this table that I looked, Aunt Margery."
"No doubt. But you should have looked in this one also, Adela. I hope the child has not got that Captain Stanley in her mind still, worrying herself over his delinquencies?" mentally concluded Miss Upton for her own private benefit.
They went back to the other room together. Frances Chenevix eagerly took the delayed glasses, used them, and put them down with a disappointed air.
"They are road labourers, Aunt Margery, and nothing else."
"To be sure, my dear," calmly returned Miss Upton, settling to her sewing again.
The owner of Court Netherleigh, preceding Miss Margery, was Sir Francis Netherleigh; his baronetcy being of old creation. Sir Francis had lived at the Court with his wife, very quietly: they had no children: and if both of them were of a saving, not to say parsimonious, turn of mind, the fact might be accounted for, and justified by their circumstances. Some of his ancestors had been wofully extravagant: and before he, Sir Francis, was born, his father and grandfather had contrived together to out off the entail. The title had of course to go to the next male heir; but the property—what was left of it—need not do so. However, it was eventually willed in the right direction, and Francis Netherleigh came into the estate and title when he was a young man. He married a prudent, good woman, of gentle but not high lineage; they cheerfully set themselves to the work of repairing what their forefathers had destroyed, and by the time Sir Francis was five-and-fifty years of age, the estate was again bringing in its full revenues of fifteen thousand a-year. Lady Netherleigh died about that time, and Sir Francis, as a widower, continued to live the same quiet, economical, unceremonious life that he and his wife had lived together. He was a religious, good man.
Naturally, the question, to whom Sir Francis would bequeath the estate, became a matter of speculation with sundry gossips—who always, you are aware, take more interest in our own affairs than we take ourselves. The title would lapse; that was known; unless indeed Sir Francis should marry again and have a son. The only relatives he had in the world were three distant female cousins.