“Captain Beverley is staying at old Mrs Bowker’s, mamma,” she exclaimed—“at least, at John Birley’s farm.”
“Or, to be perfectly correct,” said Captain Beverley, “old Mrs Bowker is staying with me, though I am quite sure she does not see the arrangement in that light at all. I was just telling Miss Western,” he continued, turning to the mother, “that Hathercourt Edge—that is to say, the old farm-house and, what is of more importance, a considerable amount of land—has just become my property; the last owner, John Birley, left it to me as the oldest lineal descendant of the name—of the Beverleys of Hathercourt. He had no near relations, and had always been proud of his own descent from the Beverleys; he came straight down from a John Beverley who owned all the land about here early in the seventeenth century, I believe, but whose eldest son sold a lot of it, so that in process of time they came to be only farmers.”
“That John Beverley must have been ‘Mawde’s’ husband, Lilias,” said Mary.
Captain Beverley looked up with interest.
“Do you mean the ‘Mawde’ about whom there is a tablet in the church here?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Mary. “Mawde Mayne, who married John Beverley of Hathercourt.”
“Ah! yes, that’s the same Mawde,” said Captain Beverley. “She is our common ancestress—poor old John Birley’s and mine, I mean. I come from another of her sons, who left these parts and married an heiress, I believe, but his descendants have had nothing to do with this place from that time to this. Isn’t it strange that Hathercourt, a part of it at least, should come back to me after all these generations?”
“It is very nice, I think,” said Mary. “I should be so proud of it, if I were you.”
Her eyes sparkled, and her face brightened up eagerly. For the first time it struck Captain Beverley that there was something very “taking” about the second Miss Western. But his glance did not rest on her; it travelled on to where Lilias sat behind the tea-tray, with a half-unconscious appeal to her for sympathy in what he was telling. Lilias, looking up, smiled.
“Yes,” she said, softly, “it is very strange.”