‘Anne, don’t! Mamma says you should never talk like that to gentlemen; they will think you go in for women’s rights and all sorts of horrible things. She doesn’t, cousin Heathcote. She only wants to make you stare.’
‘I think I go in for everybody’s rights; I don’t mind whether they are women or men,’ said Anne. ‘Mrs. Fisher, what is the matter? The children don’t come to school, and Johnny has left the choir. There must be some reason for all that.’
‘Miss Anne,’ said the woman, with a smirk and a curtsey, ‘Johnny’s been in the rectory kitchen learning to be a boy. Mr. Douglas, miss, that was stopping at the rectory, took a fancy to him, and old Simes is a-training of him. Mr. Douglas—that’s the gentleman—is going to have him at his house in town, Miss Anne. You knows him, Johnny says.’
At this Rose gave vent to a suppressed giggle, and the woman smirked more broadly than ever. But these signs might not have caught the attention of Heathcote but for the violent flush which he saw overspread Anne’s face. His attention was roused on the moment.
‘Mr. Douglas has been gone for some time,’ he heard Anne say. A note had got into her voice that had not been there before—a softness, a roundness, a melting of the tones. Mr. Douglas!—who was he? Heathcote said who was the fellow? within himself with an instinctive opposition. ‘The fellow’ had nothing whatever to do with him, yet he disliked him at once.
‘Yes, Miss Anne; but Johnny has been in the rectory kitchen a-training ever since the gentleman went away.’
Anne made the woman a little friendly sign with her hand and went on. She did not pursue her inquiries as officer of the school any more: she accepted the excuse, though it was no excuse; which showed, he said to himself with a smile, how efficient female officers of school boards would be. Perhaps she was half humbled by this evidence of being too easily satisfied. She volunteered a profession of her faith.
‘I do not approve of too stringent measures: you ought not to set up one arbitrary rule; you ought to take the circumstances into consideration.’ All this was said with a little heat. ‘I suppose why school boards have been so unpopular where they exist is very much because of that.’
Again a little giggle escaped from the bosom of Rose; but it was quickly suppressed. She gave Heathcote a significant look, as Anne was stopped by some one else who wanted to speak to her. ‘That was the gentleman,’ Rose whispered, with mischievous delight.
Well, if it was the gentleman! Heathcote thought, he was a lucky fellow; but the idea of giving up Mount was from that moment less pleasant, he could scarcely tell why. He did not relish the notion of some fellow called Douglas, probably some Scotsman who would not part with his very ordinary name for a king’s ransom, coming into possession of the old place. Who was Douglas? On the whole, Heathcote for the first time acknowledged to himself that there might be two sides to the question, and that there was something wrong and faithless in separating the old name of Mountford and the male heir from Mount.