“I am glad you showed such pluck; for why any woman should think it infra dig. to make a gown for another woman quite beats me. Why, bless you, in the colonies we fellows turned our hands to anything! Well, Aunt Catherine, they are plucky ones, these girls of yours. But we must put a stop to this sort of thing, you and I. I don’t think my uncle would have liked it. And as I am in his place––” And here he thrust aside some amber satin with his great hands, with a movement full of suggestive possibilities.
He took them all out to walk after that. Mrs. Challoner, indeed, begged to be excused,—the poor lady was already sadly fatigued, and longed for her nap,—but he would not dispense with Mattie’s company.
“We were acquaintances first,” he said to her; “and I look upon you as a sort of cousin too, Miss Mattie.” And poor little Mattie, who had never met with so much friendliness before, quite blushed and bridled with pleasure.
Mr. Drummond, who was coming out of his own gate, stood as though transfixed as the procession came towards him. The four girls were walking all abreast, Mattie in the middle; and beside them stalked a huge man, in rough, rather outlandish attire, looking like a son of the Anakin, or a red-headed Goliath.
Archie stood still in the middle of the road, and Mattie rushed up to him:
“We are going for a walk. Oh, Archie, I wish you would come too! It would be such fun!”
“Yes; do come!” cried unconscious Nan, seconding her out of pure good nature. “Mr. Drummond, this is our cousin, Sir Henry Challoner, who has just come from Australia; and we have never seen him before.” And then the young clergyman shook hands with him very stiffly, and spoke a few conventional words.
“They have not a man belonging to them,” he had said to himself, triumphantly, and then that odious Dick had turned up and now this extraordinary-looking being who called himself Sir Henry Challoner.
Archie took down the “Peerage” when he got home, for he could not be induced to join the merry party in their walk. He found the name there all right,—“Henry Fortescue Challoner, son of Sir Francis Challoner, son of Sir Henry Challoner,” and so on. It was an old baronetcy,—one of the oldest in England,—but the estates had dwindled down to a half-ruined residence and a few fields. “Challoner Place,” as it was called, was nothing but a heap of mouldering walls; but Mattie had whispered to him gleefully that he was “awfully rich, and the head of the family, and unmarried; and he did not mean to let his cousins make gowns anymore for other people, though they might do it for themselves.”
Mattie never forgot that walk. Never in her life had she 291 enjoyed such fun. Archie, with his grave face and prim ways, would have spoiled the hilarity.