She went down the path to her cart, cutting short his thanks, and he turned to enter the chapel again. She looked round and called him.
“Why do you go back?” she inquired, with a faint hope that her words had moved him to pray, possibly to give thanks for the prospects she held out.
“I have left my bill-hook, ma’am. ’Tis lying on the ground in the bottom o’ the seat.”
A slight expression of annoyance was on her face as the maid-servant helped her up to her place and brushed her dress where the wheel had rubbed it. Nannie was a clumsy driver, if a safe one, and she turned the horse round in an immense circle on the short grass. As George came out he saw the cart disappearing up the lane, the two women’s backs shaking as the wheels ran into sudden hollows, mistress’ and maid’s alike.
[CHAPTER XIX
THE MOTH AND THE CANDLE]
THE Archæological Society which reckoned the border country by the Black Mountain as its special hunting-ground met every winter or early spring; it had two places of assemblage, and those it took in turn, meeting one year at Llangarth, and the next at an insignificant township about twenty miles off across the further bank of the Wye.
When the latter place was the base of operations for the enthusiasts, it had been for ages the custom of Mr. Fenton and his wife to invite the Vicar of Crishowell to Waterchurch, so that host and guest might attend the meeting together. Both men were members of the association, and the rendezvous was within comfortable driving distance. The Squire, it is true, had only a lukewarm interest to give to antiquities, but the Vicar, whose mind had a secret strain of romance, had thrown himself heart and soul into the fascinating subject, and contributed some of the most interesting papers the society possessed.
Lady Harriet Fenton and her husband were in what the servants called “her ladyship’s boodore,” a cheerful apartment, where, as a matter of fact, most of the business of the Waterchurch estate was done, and Mr. Fenton stood on the hearthrug looking at his wife’s back, talking, as he talked nearly every day, of agricultural and money dilemmas and their solutions. He spoke sensibly enough, but the solutions had a way of being postponed until later, when he had gone off to look round the stables and Lady Harriet could settle down to her usual morning’s work.