"Who?" roared Richard, as if too much surprised to hear the name distinctly.
"Lady Ellis. I have seen him walking with her two or three times lately."
"The devil take Lady Ellis!"
"So say I; rather than she should come into the Red Court."
"Lady Ellis!" repeated Richard, panic-stricken. "That beetle-browed, bold-eyed woman--with her soft, false words, and her stealthy step! 'Ware her, Isaac. Mark me, 'ware her, all of us, should she come home to the Red Court!"
The June roses were in bloom, and the nightingales sang in the green branches. Perfume was exhaled from the linden trees; butterflies floated in the air; insects hummed through the summer day. Out at sea the fishing-boats lay idly on the sparkling waves that gently rippled in the sun. And in this joyous time the new mistress came home to the Red Court Farm.
Lady Ellis had departed for London. Some three weeks afterwards Mr. Thornycroft went up one day, and was married the next, having said nothing at all at home. It came upon Mary Anne like a thunderbolt. She cried, she sobbed, she felt every feeling within her outraged.
"Isaac, I hate Lady Ellis!"
In that first moment, with the shock upon her, it was worse than useless to argue or persuade, and Isaac wisely left it. The mischief was done; and all that remained for them was to make the best of it. Mary Anne, with the independence of will that characterized her, wrote off a pressing mandate to France, which brought Mademoiselle Derode back again. In the girl's grief she instinctively turned to the little governess, her kind friend in the past years.