‘He is a fool for his pains,’ growled Mr. Mountford from the head of the table. ‘I don’t know what our young men are coming to. What right has he to such a luxury? It will cost him a hundred pounds at the least. Six weeks—he has not been gone as many years.’
‘Four years—that is a long time when people are fond of each other,’ said Anne, with a scarcely perceptible smile. Every individual at table instantly thought of the absent lover.
‘She is thinking that I will be dead and gone in four years, and she will be free,’ the angry father said to himself, with a vindictive sense that he was justified in the punishment he meant to inflict upon her. But Anne, indeed, was thinking of nothing of the kind, only with a visionary regret that in her own family there was no one to come eager over sea and land to be longed and prayed for with Fanny Woodhead’s anxious sisterly motherly passion. This was far, very far from the imagination of the others as a motive likely to produce such a sigh.
‘A brother from India is always anxiously looked for,’ said Mrs. Mountford, stepping in with that half-compunctious readiness to succour Anne which the knowledge of this day’s proceedings had produced in her. She did not, in fact, know what these proceedings had been, and they were in no way her fault. But still she felt a compunction. ‘They always bring such quantities of things with them,’ she added. ‘An Indian box is the most delightful thing to open. I had a brother in India, too——’
‘I wish we had,’ said Rose, with a pout. Heathcote had been preoccupied: he had not been so ‘attentive’ as usual: and she wished for a brother instantly, ‘just to spite him,’ she said to herself.
‘Fanny is not thinking of the presents; but Rose, consider you are interested in it, too—that is another man for your dance.’
Rose clapped her hands. ‘We are looking up,’ she said. ‘Twenty men from Sandhurst, and six from Meadowlands, and Lady Prayrey Poule’s husband, and Fred Woodhead and Willie Ashley—for of course Willie is coming—— ’
‘A dance at this time of the year is folly,’ said Mr. Mountford; ‘even in summer it is bad enough; but the only time of the year for entertainments in the country is when you have warm weather and short nights.’
‘It was because of cousin Heathcote, papa. It is not often we have a man, a real relation, staying at Mount.’
‘Heathcote! oh, so it is for your sake, Heathcote? I did not know that dancing was an attribute of reasonable beings after thirty,’ Mr. Mountford said.