During the afternoon of this day, Saturday, Roger and I set off to walk to Brighton with the two girls. Not by the high-road, but by a near way (supposed to cut off half the distance) across a huge, dreary, flat marsh, of which you could see neither the beginning nor the end. In starting, we had reached the gate at the foot of the garden, when Harriet came running down the path. She was a tall, thin, civil young woman, with something in her voice or in her manner of speaking that seemed to my ear familiar, though I knew not how or why.
“Miss Mary,” she said, “my lady asks have you taken umbrellas, if you please. She thinks it will snow when the sun goes down.”
“Yes, yes; tell mamma we have them,” replied Mary: and Harriet ran back.
“How was it the mother came to so lonely a spot as this?” questioned Roger, as we went along, the little one, Tottams, jumping around me. “You girls must find it lively?”
Mary laughed as she answered. “We do find it lively, Roger, and we often ask her why she came. But when mamma and George looked at the place, it was a bright, hot summer’s day. They liked it then: it has plenty of rooms in it, you see, though they are old-fashioned; and the rent was so very reasonable. Be quiet, Tottams.”
“So reasonable that I should have concluded the place had a ghost in it,” said Roger.
“George’s curacy was at Brighton in those days, you know, Roger: that is why we came to the neighbourhood.”
“And George had left for a better curacy before you had well settled down here! Miss Tottams, if you pull at Johnny Ludlow like that, I shall send you back by yourself.”
“True. But we like the place very well now we are used to it, and we know a few nice people. One family—the Archers—we like very much. Six daughters, Roger; one of them, Bessy, would make you a charming wife. You will have to marry, you know, when you set up in practice. They are coming to us next Wednesday evening.”