‘Our mother is bedridden,’ said Ethelberta, noticing Christopher’s look at the proceeding. ‘Emmeline attends to the household, except when Picotee is at home, and Joey attends to the gate; but our mother’s affliction is a very unfortunate thing for the poor children. We are thinking of a plan of living which will, I hope, be more convenient than this is; but we have not yet decided what to do.’ At this minute a carriage and pair of horses became visible through one of the angular windows of the apse, in the act of turning in from the highway towards the park gate. The boy who answered to the name of Joey sprang up from the table with the promptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and ran out at the door. Everybody turned as the carriage passed through the gate, which Joey held open, putting his other hand where the brim of his hat would have been if he had worn one, and lapsing into a careless boy again the instant that the vehicle had gone by.
‘There’s a tremendous large dinner-party at the House to-night,’ said Emmeline methodically, looking at the equipage over the edge of her teacup, without leaving off sipping. ‘That was Lord Mountclere. He’s a wicked old man, they say.’
‘Lord Mountclere?’ said Ethelberta musingly. ‘I used to know some friends of his. In what way is he wicked?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Emmeline, with simplicity. ‘I suppose it is because he breaks the commandments. But I wonder how a big rich lord can want to steal anything.’ Emmeline’s thoughts of breaking commandments instinctively fell upon the eighth, as being in her ideas the only case wherein the gain could be considered as at all worth the hazard.
Ethelberta said nothing; but Christopher thought that a shade of depression passed over her.
‘Hook back the gate, Joey,’ shouted Emmeline, when the carriage had proceeded up the drive. ‘There’s more to come.’
Joey did as ordered, and by the time he got indoors another carriage turned in from the public road—a one-horse brougham this time.
‘I know who that is: that’s Mr. Ladywell,’ said Emmeline, in the same matter-of-fact tone. ‘He’s been here afore: he’s a distant relation of the squire’s, and he once gave me sixpence for picking up his gloves.’
‘What shall I live to see?’ murmured the poetess, under her breath, nearly dropping her teacup in an involuntary trepidation, from which she made it a point of dignity to recover in a moment. Christopher’s eyes, at that exhibition from Ethelberta, entered her own like a pair of lances. Picotee, seeing Christopher’s quick look of jealousy, became involved in her turn, and grew pale as a lily in her endeavours to conceal the complications to which it gave birth in her poor little breast likewise.
‘You judge me very wrongly,’ said Ethelberta, in answer to Christopher’s hasty look of resentment.