“Yes, of course. Why do you always ask me? Don’t you feel at home here, dear Aunt Anne?” Florence asked, thinking that Sir William’s answer had, after all, committed him to little.
“I hope I shall never so far forget myself as not to treat you with the courtesy that you have a right to expect, my darling. I will never take advantage of our relationship.—Jane,” she said, with quite another manner, and in a cold and slightly haughty tone, to the servant who had entered, “would you have the goodness to divest me of my cloak? and if your mistress gives you permission, perhaps you would carry it up to my room?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jane, respectfully, but without much willingness in her manner. The servants had learnt to resent the tone in which Mrs. Baines usually spoke to them. “She treats us like dirt,” the housemaid explained to the cook; “and if were made of dirt, I should like to know what she’s made of? She give me a shilling the other day, and another time a new apron done up in a box from the draper’s; but I don’t care about her for all her presents. I know she always sees every speck of dust that others would be blind to; it’s in her wink that she does.”
“And now that you have told me all your news, I want you to listen to mine,” Florence said.
Then she gave an account of Mr. Fisher’s visit, and of the letting of the house for a couple of months.
“So, Aunt Anne,” she continued triumphantly, “I want you to be very, very good, and to go with the children and two of the servants to the cottage at Witley to-morrow, and to be the mistress of the great establishment, if you will, and mother to the children till I come; that proves how bad I think your influence is for them, doesn’t it, you unkind old dear?”—and she stooped and kissed Mrs. Baines.
Aunt Anne was delighted, and consented at once.
“I shall never forget your putting this confidence in me. You have proved your affection for me most truly,” she said. “My dear Florence, your children shall have the most loving care that it is in my power to give them. I will look after everything till you come; more zealously than you yourself could. Tell me, love, where do you say the cottage is situated?”
“It is near Witley, it is on the direct Portsmouth road; a sweet little cottage with a garden, and fir woods stretching on either side.”
“And how far is it from Portsmouth, my love?” Mrs. Baines asked eagerly.