“It is what the Greys wished,” I said, by way of impressing it upon him more forcibly, “and considering how very kindly and generously they behaved to us, the least we can do is to respect their wishes to the full. You must never speak of it, Moore, to any of your school-fellows.”
He repeated his promise, and I felt satisfied that he would not forget it. He had had a lesson; all the same I was glad to know that he had overheard nothing of the dialogue which had so impressed me myself.
One thing I did, and feeling assured of the entire purity of my motive, I could not feel that I was wrong in this. Not many days after our return home, when I happened to find myself alone with father, I inquired, in as casual a tone as possible of him, if the name “Ernest” was a family one with us.
His manner was completely free from consciousness of any kind, as he replied after a moment or two’s consideration—
“Well, no; I should scarcely call it such, though there have been one or two of the name among us. One, by-the-bye, whose career would scarcely add prestige to the name he bore, whatever it had been!”
“Who was he?” I said, “and what did he do?” speaking as quietly as I could, for I had no wish, naturally, to rouse any curiosity on my father’s part.
“I scarcely know,” he replied. “He was a distant cousin only, and he has long since disappeared. I fancy he was more weak than wicked, a tool in the hands of a thoroughly unprincipled man, but I never heard the details, nor would they be edifying to know. What put it into your head, Regina, to ask about the name? You are not thinking of getting up a family chronicle, are you?”
“Oh dear no,” I said lightly. “I heard the name accidentally quite, and I just wondered if it belonged to any relation of ours;” and there, for the time being, the matter dropped.
The summer and autumn succeeding our visit to Millflowers passed uneventfully. One great disappointment they brought with them, and that was the impossibility of Isabel Wynyard coming to stay with us, as we had hoped might have been the case. I forget the special reasons for this. I think they must have been connected with her father’s being less well than usual, for, looking back to that time as we have often done since, it seems as if the slow failure which ended a few years later in his death had begun to show itself that year. Soon after Christmas, however, Mr Wynyard went to pay a visit to the Percys, and then Isabel came to us. It was of course delightful to me to have her, and to reverse the rôles of our previous time together, for I had now the pleasure—always, I think, a very great one—of acting hostess and cicerone of our pretty neighbourhood—pretty at all seasons, even in midwinter, to my mind at least, in which opinion Isabel cordially agreed.
She had been the sweetest of little hostesses; she was the most charming of guests. Every-thing seemed to come right to her, and everybody liked her. I think she specially loved the filing of a mother in our home, above all a mother who had known hers.