“I don’t see that we need know people we don’t want to know, any more when living in the town than in the neighbourhood,” said Blanche. “We can keep quite to ourselves; unless, of course, you can look up some of your old friends, who would understand how we were placed.”
Mrs Derwent seemed perplexed.
“I wish I could,” she said, “but I scarcely know how to begin. There seems nothing but changes. It is such a disappointment about dear old Sir Adam to start with.”
“Still we are gaining nothing in that way by remaining in London,” said Blanche. “And when at Blissmore you can find out about the people you used to know, and perhaps write to them.”
“I can find out about them, certainly,” Mrs Derwent agreed. “But I don’t think I should actually write or suggest any one’s calling, till we are in our own house, and have everything nice and settled. People are so prejudiced. They would immediately begin saying we lived poorly or messily because we had been so long in France.”
“I don’t think any one could live ‘messily’ in Miss Halliday’s house if they tried. It is so beautifully neat,” said Stasy, who had taken a great fancy to their little landlady. “Do let us go there, mamma. I am so tired of being here. London is horrid in winter, especially if you have no friends. And why should you and Blanche worry about the hotel bills, when there is no need, and none of us want to stay?”
And in the end, as not unfrequently happened—for there was often a good deal of wisdom in her suggestions—Stasy’s proposal was adopted; so that about three weeks after their first arrival in England, the Derwents found themselves settled for the time being at Number Twenty-Nine in the old High Street of Blissmore.
It was not exactly the beginning of life in England which Mrs Derwent had pictured to herself. It was a trifle dreary to be back again, really back again in the immediate neighbourhood of her old home, with no one except Miss Halliday—herself a new-comer in the place—to welcome her and her children, or take the slightest interest in their advent.
“If there had been even one or two of our old servants left somewhere near,” she could not help saying to Blanche that night, when Stasy and little Hertford had gone to bed, in high spirits at having really got away from “that horrid London,” as they both called it. “But every one seems gone that I had to do with,” she concluded, in a depressed tone.
“You really can’t judge yet, mamma,” said Blanche. “You haven’t looked up anybody except Sir Adam Nigel, and you said you would rather wait till we were settled in our own house.”