“To know how ladies behave.”
“I suppose you’ll go your own way,” said Bernard, after a pause; “but people’ll talk if you go on meeting him.”
“Let them. I don’t mean to stay down here.”
“I do,” said Bernard.
Dolly perceived the force of this objection. She valued Farquhar’s advice; but where her own aims clashed with Bernard’s well-being, she rarely hesitated.
“Very well; I won’t meet him again,” she said. “But, Bernard, if he speaks to you, do you respond. Ask him here; no one can find fault if I see him in my own house. Or I don’t think they can; do you?”
She was reassured by Bernard’s hearty assent, backed by a special instance. “For,” said he, “when Maude had his sister staying here, Farquhar went and saw them; and I guess if he goes to Maude’s house he can come to us.” And the point was thus settled.
Two days before Christmas the wind blew softly from the south, the snow melted from the earth and the clouds from the sky, the robins broke out into their pure celestial strains, and it was spring in all but name. Farquhar’s invalid began to pester his doctor for permission to go out, and Dolly got a white hat to go with her chestnut gown.
Christmas Day itself was a flash of summer. Dolly came down dressed for church at half-past ten, and found her brother ready in a Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and a cap. An inward monitor told her that this attire was incorrect, and she said so; but as Bernard had nothing else to wear, the question solvitur ambulando.
Neither of them had ever been to church. In early days Bernard had been sent to a chapel with a damnatory creed, and he took his sister with him till she developed opinions of her own: an epoch early in Dolly’s history. She rebelled: Bernard, who was bored by the service, outraged by the music, and submissive only from indifference, supported her: and Mr. Fane’s graceless children took their own way, and henceforth spent the Sabbath hours in reading, prefaced always by a chapter of the Bible.