“You need not apologise to me,” answered Phemie; “we are too old friends to stand on ceremony.” And she put out her hand and clasped his again after years—after years.
“Well, I declare,” cried Mrs. Basil Stondon, while they all stood grouped together in the hall; “if this is not a pleasant surprise. Who would have thought of meeting you here?”
“There is nothing extraordinary in meeting me,” Phemie answered; “the wonder is meeting you.”
“It was a fancy of Basil’s,” that gentleman’s wife replied. “He wanted to come north—and so we came north; we have been here, in Westmoreland I mean, ten days, and I for one was getting terribly sick of it; but now you are in the same place it will make a difference. It is so horrid being among strangers, not having a soul one knows to speak to.”
Phemie agreed that to be so placed must indeed be distressing; and they all adjourned upstairs, and having arranged to spend the evening together, the ladies took off their bonnets while the gentlemen ordered tea.
“And you positively look younger than when I saw you last,” remarked Mrs. Basil Stondon, querulously; “but it is easy for you to look young: free from care and without children, and surrounded by every blessing and comfort, why should you not keep your beauty?”
“I have not kept it,” answered Phemie, and she sighed as she spoke; though the past with its vanities, and its temptations, and its sorrows and its repentance seemed like a dream to her at the moment. “I have not kept it, and there is no reason why I should have kept it. Youth cannot stay with us for ever, Georgina; if it did, girls would have small chance of ever being either wooed or wed.”
There was a little side blow in this sentence, and Georgina felt it. Her youth had helped her to secure Basil, a prize she often told him was scarcely worth the trouble, to which remark he had a habit of retorting—
“You did not think so at one time, at least, judging by the trouble you took,” for Basil never hesitated to remind his wife of the efforts she had made to win him, and was not over delicate about recapitulating to her all the advantages she had gained for herself by the match.
They lived such a life that the presence of any stranger seemed a relief; and accordingly both husband and wife eagerly pressed Mr. Aggland, and Phemie, and Helen to join them in their various excursions, and to make up parties for visiting Keswick, and Coniston, and Ullswater, and many a lovely spot much more accessible from Ambleside than those just enumerated.