“Not tall, they said,” answered her husband. “About the middle size and slight. Not good-looking, but gentlemanlike; very dark, and black hair, rather grey for his age, for they say he didn’t look much over thirty. I can think of no one I know answering this description, who would be likely to be enquiring after me. Can you?”
“I don’t know,” said Marion, rather dreamily, but any one more observant than Geoffrey would have thought that for a woman she manifested singularly little curiosity about the mysterious unknown.
“Black hair, rather grey for his age,” she murmured softly to herself more than once that evening. “It had not a thread of silver when I knew it.”
A week later came one morning a letter for Geoffrey which, arriving after he had left for business, excited, not a little, Marion’s curiosity during the day. It was addressed in a somewhat stiff, old-fashioned hand, and its postmark was Mallingford. She had more than half a mind to open it, fearful of the effect of possible bad news coming suddenly on her husband; but ended by not doing so. Afterwards she was very glad she had left it for Geoffrey to read first himself.
It was from old Squire Copley, containing a formal offer to Mr. Baldwin from Lord Brackley, of his Brentshire agency, unexpectedly made vacant by the death of the last holder some six weeks before!
“I need hardly, my dear fellow,” wrote the Squire, “urge your acceptance of this offer. It is a capital good thing of its kind, the income, one way and another, very little short of a thousand a year, inclusive of course of the house, a sweet pretty place for a young couple as one would wish to see. Brackley has been down here himself for a week or two, looking into things a bit, and when he told me you had been recommended to him for the post, and that he was entertaining the idea, I was as pleased, I assure you, as if you had been a son of my own. ‘The very man for the place,’ said I. And so say one and all hereabouts, my boy. Lady Anne and Maggie—Georgie’s in India, you know—will be only too delighted to welcome you and your wife and the little one I heard of if I’m not mistaken, back to your old neighbourhood. And I’m not afraid that you will break your hearts at having to leave Millington, for you’re Brentshire born and bred, and so in a sense is your wife.”
Then followed a little local gossip, to which, however, it was hardly to be expected that Geoffrey or his wife could at this moment pay much attention.
They looked at each other with tears in their eyes, but sunshine in their hearts.
“Oh, Geoffrey, how thankful I am!” she exclaimed. “Now you will have a chance of getting like your old self again. Now I need not feel anxious about you any more. How happy, how very happy we shall be.”
“My darling,” he replied, drawing her towards him, “will you really be happy in a pretty country home of your own with a stupid old ploughman like me? Squire Copley is right, it is a dear little place, the house where we shall live. Much prettier than the Manor Farm, though not so large. But I am not sorry to begin our new life in a new house. You had plenty of sorrow in the old one, my dearest. Heaven grant you may have little in your new home! None at least of my causing.”