‘No, no! run, Flo; my husband will be so glad to see you here. I daresay you remember him in old times, though we were not here when you were a child. It was his father then who was Rector, and Lady William—I mean my sister-in-law Emily—was the young lady at home, as it might be one of my girls now.’
‘I recollect it all very well,’ said Leo, with a look and a smile which did not betray his sense that the girls now were not by any means what the Emily Plowden he remembered had been. He even paused, and said with a tone which naturally came into his voice when he spoke to a young woman—‘I see now how like your daughter is to the Miss Plowden who used to play with me, and put up with me when I was a disagreeable little boy.’
‘I am sure you never were a disagreeable little boy,’ said Mrs. Plowden. ‘I have often heard Emily speak of you. She was very fond of you as a child.’
‘I hope she will not give up that good habit now I am a man. I hope, indeed, I am a little more bearable than I was then. I was a spoiled brat, I am afraid. Now, I am more aware of my deficiencies. Ah, Rector, how do you do? I am so glad to meet another old friend.’
‘How do you do, Leo?’ said the Rector. The girls admired and wondered, to hear that their father did not hesitate to call this fine gentleman by his Christian name. ‘It is a very long time since we met, and I don’t know that I should have recognised you: a boy of twelve, and a man of——’
‘Thirty,’ said Leo, with a laugh, ‘don’t spare me—though it is a little hard in presence of these young ladies. But it has not made any such change in you, sir, and I should have known you anywhere.’
‘Twenty years is a long time. What do you say, Jane? Eighteen years: well, there’s no great difference. And so you have come home at last, and I hope now you are at home you mean to stay, and take up the duties of an English country gentleman, my dear fellow—which is your real vocation, you know, as your father’s son.’
‘And what are those duties, my dear Rector,’ said Leo, with a laugh; ‘perhaps my ideas are rather muddled by my French habits—to keep up a pack of fox-hounds, and ride wildly across country: and provide a beef roasted whole for Christmas?’
‘Well, you can never go wrong about the beef at Christmas—but I think we’ll let you off the fox-hounds. If you’ll subscribe to the hunt, that will be enough.’
‘That is a comfort,’ said the unaccustomed squire, ‘for I am not, I fear, a Nimrod at all.’