After that, Mrs. Ormson abandoned all idea of a housekeeper for Arthur.
“Your case is a hard one, Arthur, I fear,” she said, “when even Piggott will not help you out of your scrape. Clearly you must marry—let me look out a wife for you. I know so many nice girls, suitable in every respect, and several with money too. You know you ought to marry a rich woman, that is, if you can get one to marry you.”
“There’s the difficulty,” remarked Arthur, thinking of the faithless heiress.
“Well, let me see what I can do,” implored Mrs. Ormson, who devoutly believed the Almighty had sent her into the world to set right the things He had unintentionally left wrong at the creation. “When are you coming to London?”
“Next month; to stay a day or two with Dick Travers.”
“Then give me a few days at the same time, and, before the summer is over, there will be a mistress at Berrie Down. Mark my words.”
Whether Squire Dudley marked her words may be doubted; but he verified them, in a manner Mrs. Ormson little anticipated, by going to Dick Travers’, by being persuaded to accompany that gentleman to visit his aunt Mrs. Travers, “who has three pretty daughters, and a niece staying with her; the finest girl I ever saw,” finished Mr. Richard Travers. “No nonsense about her; up to everything—ready for anything. Can make a dress, and dance in it afterwards; sit up all night with the old lady, and come down to breakfast next morning fresh as a daisy. Just the girl I’d marry, if I could scrape together money enough to buy the license; but she is too poor for me, Dudley, or for you either, for that matter. A wife with only a few hundreds is a luxury only to be indulged in by a very rich man.”
“She comes of good people,” he went on,—“the Bells of Layford. They have money among them, though, I am sorry to say, but little of it has fallen to her share. More’s the pity! Daughter of the late Rector of Layford—mother dead also—two sisters in heaven with father and mother—not an incumbrance of any kind. Well, it is of no use; you cannot afford it, I suppose, any more than I can.”
“I cannot,” agreed Arthur Dudley, as gravely as though Mr. Travers had made some serious proposition to him; and then straight away he went and did the very thing he had said in all earnestness he could not afford.
She struck his fancy—that pretty girl with the quaint name; sweet Heather Bell, as Mr. Travers always called her.