"And it is so nice without Miss Evans!"
Grandpapa laughed at this, really laughed; but Tib and I could have pinched Gerald. For, alas! grandpapa added—
"That's right—not to have let me forget about finding a new Miss Evans;" and if he saw—which I don't know—Tib's and my faces when he said that, he must have been satisfied that we could look what we felt very candidly.
Grandpapa only stayed two days; but his visit was really much nicer than we had fancied it would be. He took us to church on Sunday himself. But, rather to our disappointment, not to the pretty old church we had passed on first entering the village, but to one at least three miles off, which was not at all pretty nor interesting. There was nobody at all there except very stupid-looking, poor country people, and the sermon was very long, and the clergyman very dull and stupid himself. To be sure, the driving there and back in the dog-cart a little made up for it; but still, we were very vexed when grandpapa said we were to come to this church every Sunday, if it was fine, in the dog-cart, Tib in front beside Reeves the groom, and me behind with nurse, and Gerald stuck in beside Tib; and if it was rainy, in the old fly from the inn in the village.
We heard grandpapa giving these orders to Reeves on the way home.
"Oh, grandpapa!" I said—I was sitting on the back seat, so I felt more courageous, I suppose—"must we go every Sunday to that stupid little church? I'm sure the one in the village is much nicer."
"Have you been there?" said grandpapa, very sharply.
"No, grandpapa," I replied; "we've not been anywhere at all in the village. But we saw the church the day we came."
"Then you cannot possibly know anything about it; and if you were even capable of having an opinion, it would not make the slightest difference to mine," he said, in his very horridest cold way.
But he got nicer again after a bit. He even took us a little walk with him in the afternoon, round a very pretty way, going away down the lane into which the gate of Rosebuds opens, and into some woods and copsey sort of places that were awfully nice. Grandpapa was very quiet, and didn't speak much; but he wasn't sharp or catching up. Once or twice he stood still, and looked about him with an expression on his face I had never seen there before, and he said to us—