“Thank you,” he replied, “we can hardly tell. Will you be so good as to come in, and I will tell your sister you are here.”
Lilias came in, and depositing her parcel—bundle, rather—on the table, stood, nothing loth, beside the welcome blaze of the kitchen fire.
“How queer it is,” she thought, “Mary seems quite established here! In the very heart of the enemy’s camp, according to her opinion, at least, for she has always persisted that Mr Cheviott’s interference was to be blamed for it all. I don’t think it was. Arthur would not be so fond of him if he were that sort of man, and besides,” with an unconscious slight elevation of her pretty head, “he is not the sort of man to be interfered with.”
Then she glanced round the kitchen—a pleasant, old-fashioned farm-house kitchen, not unpicturesque as seen in the flickering firelight, alternately lighting up and hiding the dark rafters and the quaintly-carved oak settle, where for so many years old John Birley had sat and smoked his pipe, and mused on the fallen fortunes of his house. The last of the Hathercourt Beverleys, Mawde’s great-great-grandson, to have come down to the bent, blue-stockinged old farmer, whose figure, hobbling into church, Lilias had been familiar with ever since she could remember.
“Fancy Mawde Beverley, beautiful and refined as she almost certainly was—the Maynes of Southcote are said to have been very beautiful—fancy her looking forward along the centuries to that old rough man as one of her great-grandchildren!” thought Lilias. “If she could have looked forward to Arthur—what a difference! Life is a very queer thing—queer and sad too, I suppose. Still I am glad to be alive, and to take my chance of the goods and bads.”
Unconsciously to herself, hope was re-asserting itself in Lilias’s heart; she could not have spoken or felt thus a few days previously.
Her soliloquy was soon interrupted.
“Lily,” exclaimed a voice behind her, and turning round Lilias saw Mary entering the kitchen. “I could hardly believe Mr Cheviott when he said you were here,” Mary went on. “And all alone, too! Lily, I do believe he thinks us all half mad!” She gave a little laugh, but checked it suddenly.
Lilias looked at her in surprise.
“Why should he?” she said, quickly. “I don’t see anything particularly mad in my coming down to look after you. I am your elder sister. Mother could not come. I don’t think you are quite fair on that man, Mary.”