"When Mr. Messenger's father married Susannah Coppin, I have heard——"
Here he stopped.
"Halloo!" cried Harry. "Go on, Venerable. Why, we are cousins or nephews, or something, of Miss Messenger. Josephus, my boy, cheer up!"
Mr. Maliphant's memory now jumped over two generations, and he went on:
"Caroline Coppin married a sergeant in the army, and a handsome lad—I forget his name. But Mary Coppin married Bunker. The Coppins were a good old Whitechapel stock, as good as the Messengers. As for Bunker, he was an upstart, he was; and came from Barking, as I always understood."
Then he was once more silent.
CHAPTER XXI. LADY DAVENANT.
It was a frequent custom with Lady Davenant to sit with the girls in the workroom in the morning. She liked to have a place where she could talk; she took an ex-professional interest in their occupation; she had the eye of an artist for their interpretation of the fashion. Moreover, it pleased her to be in the company of Miss Kennedy, who was essentially a woman's woman. Men who are so unhappy as to have married a man's woman will understand perfectly what I mean. On the morning after Harry's most providential birthday, therefore, when she appeared no one was in the least disturbed. But to-day she did not greet the girls with her accustomed stately inclination of the head which implied that, although now a peeress, she had been brought up to their profession and in a republican school of thought, and did not set herself up above her neighbors. Yet respect to rank should be conceded, and was expected. In general, too, she was talkative, and enlivened the tedium of work with many an anecdote illustrating Canaan City and its ways, or showing the lethargic manners of the Davenants, both her husband and his, to say nothing of the grandfather, contented with the lowly occupation of a wheelwright while he might have soared to the British House of Lords. This morning, however, she sat down and was silent, and her head drooped. Angela, who sat next her and watched, presently observed that a tear formed in her eye, and dropped upon her work, and that her lips moved as if she was holding a conversation with herself. Thereupon she arose, put her hand upon the poor lady's arm, and drew her away without a word to the solitude of the dining-room, where her ladyship gave way and burst into an agony of sobbing.
Angela stood before her, saying nothing. It was best to let the fit have its way. When the crying was nearly over, she laid her hand upon her hair and gently smoothed it.