"No, indeed," returned Queenie, trying to maintain her gravity. Cathy's eyes were dancing with fun, like a mischievous kitten; the wicked little creature knew how difficult it was for her friend not to laugh outright.
Mr. Logan certainly presented a curious appearance to a stranger's eyes. The good man was clad in a brown dressing-gown, patched neatly at the elbows with parti-coloured cloth, and his spectacles were pushed up his forehead, showing a pair of near-sighted blue eyes.
He was a tall spare man, with the plainest face, Queenie thought, she had ever seen, the features were so rugged and irregular; the spectacles and grey hair gave him an elderly appearance. Queenie heard afterwards that he was only in his fortieth year, and that Miss Cosie was quite ten years older.
The eyes were the only redeeming features. Either seen with or without the spectacles they were mild and yet keen; they could beam softly, as they did now at the two girls, with hearty benevolence, or dart searching glances that seemed to quiver like an arrow-point in the recesses of one's conscience. "They look through and through you," Cathy said once; "it is just like throwing a torch into a dark place, it brings all sorts of hidden things to light,—cobwebs and little foolishnesses, and odds and ends of rubbish."
"I like eyes that talk," was Queenie's answer to this. She liked Mr. Logan's face, in spite of its plainness; his voice too was so pleasant. She conceived a warm respect for the Vicar of Hepshaw on this first visit. In spite of his somewhat worn and homely appearance, the innate dignity of the man made itself felt as he walked beside them in his old threadbare garment.
"Charlotte; where are you, Charlotte?" he exclaimed, raising his voice as they stood in what was termed the best sitting-room, a somewhat humble apartment with one small window.
"Here, Christopher, my dear," responded a small chirping voice from the inner recesses of the house, and a tiny woman tripped softly after it.
Miss Cosie! who could help giving her the name, she was so small and so compact, with such a comfortable pincushion-like compactness; a little grey mouse of a woman, with, her grey dress, and grey Shetland shawl crossed over her shoulders, and the two large glossy curls pinned up on either side of the small head, which she was always patting with her little fat hands.
Why her very voice had a cosy sound in it. "My dear" seemed to drop perpetually out of it; it was a caressing, petting sort of voice, with a continual hush in it. "Hush! there, there, my dear," was her panacea for every one, from a crying child to a widowed virago. "There, there, my dear, we can't have him back, but I dare say he is better off," or "there, there, my good man, go home to your poor wife," to a six-foot piece of drunken ruffianism she met staggering through the village and vociferating oaths in the darkness. "There, there, poor thing, he has lost himself, and is just daft; hush! we won't listen; the devil is schoolmaster to-night, and is teaching him a little bit of his own language."
Cosie! why the name was an inspiration; it fitted her to a nicety. Charlotte was simply a badinage, something for which her godmother was to blame, not she; no one but her brother would ever call her by such a term; it was almost crushing—but Miss Cosie!