“You look very nice in your muslin, my dear,” she said, “and so does that pretty darling, that would look well in anything; but when you come to my time of life it makes a difference; and roaming about from place to place how could I have room for muslins? not to say that washing is a ruination. I have one evening body made with good black silk. It costs a little more at the time, but what does that matter? And there you are, both for morning and evening, quite set up.”
“It is a very admirable plan, I am sure,” Lady Markham said, with great seriousness, checking with a look the laugh that was in Alice’s eyes. The children were in the drawing-room, all four of them, very ready to make friends with their beloved colonel’s wife.
“I feel as if I had something to do with them. I feel as if I were their grandmother, though I never had a child of my own,” she said. Thus everything went harmoniously in the drawing-room, though the ladies were all a little curious to know what kept the gentlemen so long over their wine. Sir William’s coffee grew cold; he had never been known to be so late before.
CHAPTER IX.
“They’re talking over old days,” Mrs. Lenny had said three or four times before the gentlemen appeared. What could be more natural? No doubt they had gone from recollection to recollection: “Do you remember” this and that, and “what happened to” so-and-so? It was very easy to imagine what they were talking about, and how they got led on from one subject to another. They were heard talking, when they at last appeared, all the way up the long drawing-room, pausing at the door.
“All died out, I believe,” Colonel Lenny was saying. “The last son lost his children one after another, and died himself at the last broken-hearted, poor man! The daughters were all scattered—but Katey knows more about them than I do.”
“I am really afraid to ask any more questions,” Sir William said. What more natural?
“Yes, my dear lady,” Colonel Lenny resumed, taking his old place beside Lady Markham; “we have been making the most of our time; for it is very likely we may have letters to-morrow, my wife and I, summoning us away. I don’t like it, and neither will she, and perhaps we may have another day, but I scarcely think it likely. I don’t know how we’re to drag ourselves away. You have been kinder than any one ever was; and the children have got a hold of my old heart, bless them!”
The colonel had genuine tears in his eyes.
“Lenny will tell you what I propose,” said Sir William on the other side. “It is not an easy position. I have always thought myself quite safe—quite free of responsibility; and now to be pulled up all at once; and when I think of my own boys——”