The name appeared to startle the Rector. “Sarah Anne Grame!” he repeated. “She will never battle through it!” The doctor raised his eyebrows, as if he thought it doubtful himself, and signed to his groom to hasten on.
“Tell Lady Sarah I will call upon her in the course of the day,” called out Mr. Hastings, as the gig sped on its way. “I must ask Maria if she has heard news of this,” he continued, in soliloquy, as he turned within the Rectory gate.
Maria Hastings had found her way to the study. To dignify a room by the appellation of “study” in a clergyman’s house, would at once imply that it must be the private sanctum of its master, consecrated to his sermons and his other clerical studies. Not so, however, in the Rectory of All Souls. The study there was chiefly consecrated to litter, and the master had less to do with it, personally, than with almost any other room in the house. There, the children, boys and girls, played, or learned lessons, or practised; there, Mrs. Hastings would sit to sew when she had any work in hand too plebeian for the eyes of polite visitors.
Grace, the eldest of the family, was twenty years of age, one year older than Maria. She bore a great resemblance to her father; and, like him, was more practical than imaginative. She was very useful, in the house, and took much care off Mrs. Hastings’s hands. It happened that all the children, five of them besides Maria, were this morning at home. It was holiday that day with the boys. Isaac was next to Maria, but nearly three years younger; one had died between them; Reginald was next; Harry last; and then came a little girl, Rose. They ought to have been preparing their lessons; were supposed to be doing so by Mr. and Mrs. Hastings: in point of fact, they were gathering round Grace, who was seated on a low stool solving some amusing puzzles from a new book. They started up when Maria entered, and went dancing round her.
Maria danced too; she kissed them all; she sang aloud in her joyousness of heart. What was it that made that heart so glad, her life as a very Eden? The ever-constant presence there of George Godolphin.
“Have you come home to stay, Maria?”
“I have come home to go,” she answered, with a laugh. “We start for Scotland on Monday, and I want to hunt up oceans of things.”
“It is fine to be you, Maria,” exclaimed Grace, with a sensation very like envy. “You have all the pleasure, and I have to stop at home and do all the work. It is not fair.”
“Gracie dear, it will be your turn next. I did not ask Lady Godolphin to invite me, instead of you. I never thought of her inviting me, being the younger of the two.”
“But she did invite you,” grumbled Grace.