Queenie obeyed him wonderingly. She had been in Garth's den before, Cathy had taken her, but she looked round it with fresh interest.
There were the book-shelves he had made and stained himself, loaded with his favorite authors—Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay, "fine fellows all of them," he would say; and his writing-table with all its old bachelor's appurtenances,—the pipe-rack and red earthen tobacco-jar; and the worn easy-chair, the shabbiest and the most comfortable in the house. Opposite was the picture of his mother, a large faded oil-painting of a woman, not young, but with a sweet gentle face and Garth's blue-grey eyes.
Queenie looked at it for some time, and then she went to the window. A little bird was singing through the rain, the drops splashed endlessly from the white-rose bush under the window; the steep lawn planted sparsely with trees ran down to the lane. Langley's jessamine and clove-pink steeped the wet air with fragrance; a half-drowned bee clung to a spray of woodbine. "Most people would call this dull; and how they would hate that little gate leading to the churchyard, and the thought of that granite monument shining in the moonlight, but to me it is the dearest place," thought Queenie, leaning against the window-frame in sweet abstraction.
"Are you there, Miss Marriott? I am so sorry to have kept you waiting," observed Garth apologetically, coming to her side in his quick way. "Langley detained me with some questions of domestic detail that could not be postponed."
"It does not matter, I was in no hurry. Look at that bee, Mr. Clayton; I was just going out to rescue him; he is shipwrecked, and wants to save his cargo of honey."
"You shall go to him by-and-bye. I only want to say a word to you. I have talked to Mr. Logan, and everything is arranged. In a month from this time you are to enter on your new duties as mistress of the Hepshaw girls' school."
END OF VOL. I.
BUNGAY: CLAY AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.