“Somebody has been doing something to the house,” said Marian involuntarily; and Agnes paused in echoing the sentiment, as she caught a glimpse of a rising cloud on her mother’s comely brow.
“Indeed, children, I am grieved to see how soon you have learned to despise your home,” said Mrs Atheling; and the good mother reddened, and contracted her forehead. She had watched them with a little jealousy from their first entrance, and they, to tell the truth, had been visibly struck with the smallness and the dulness of the family rooms.
“Despise!” cried Marian, kneeling down, and leaning her beautiful head and her clasped arms upon her mother’s knee. “Despise!” said Agnes, putting her arm over Mrs Atheling’s shoulder from behind her chair; “oh, mamma, you ought to know better!—we who have learned that there are people in the world who have neither a mother nor a home!”
“Well, then, what is the matter?” said Mrs Atheling; and she began to smooth the beautiful falling hair, which came straying over her old black silk lap, like Danae’s shower of gold.
“Nothing at all—only the room is a little smaller, and the carpet a little older than it used to be,” said Agnes; “but, mamma, because we notice that, you do not think surely that we are less glad to be at home.”
“Well, my dears,” said Mrs Atheling, still a little piqued; “your great friend, when he called the other day, did not seem to think there was anything amiss about the house.”
“Our great friend!” The girls looked at each other with dismay—who could it be?
“His card is on the mantelpiece,” said Mrs Atheling. “He had not very much to say, but he seemed a pleasant young man—Sir Something—Sir Langham; but, indeed, my dear, though, of course, I was pleased to see him, I am not at all sure how far such acquaintances are proper for you.”
“He was scarcely my acquaintance, mamma,” said Agnes, sorrowfully looking down from behind her mother’s chair upon Marian, who had hid her face in Mrs Atheling’s lap, and made no sign.
“For our rank in life is so different,” pursued the prudent mother; “and even though I might have some natural ambition for you, I do not think, Agnes, that it would really be wishing you well to wish that you should form connections so far out of the sphere of your own family as that.”