'Oh dear!' she said to her maid; 'look at those chimneys! My poor

sister Hale! I don't think I could have rested at Naples, if I

had known what it was! I must have come and fetched her and

Margaret away.' And to herself she acknowledged, that she had

always thought her brother-in-law rather a weak man, but never so

weak as now, when she saw for what a place he had exchanged the

lovely Helstone home.

Margaret had remained in the same state; white, motionless,

speechless, tearless. They had told her that her aunt Shaw was

coming; but she had not expressed either surprise or pleasure, or

dislike to the idea. Mr. Bell, whose appetite had returned, and

who appreciated Dixon's endeavours to gratify it, in vain urged

upon her to taste some sweetbreads stewed with oysters; she shook

her head with the same quiet obstinacy as on the previous day;

and he was obliged to console himself for her rejection, by

eating them all himself But Margaret was the first to hear the

stopping of the cab that brought her aunt from the railway

station. Her eyelids quivered, her lips coloured and trembled.

Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and when they came up,

Margaret was standing, trying to steady her dizzy self; and when

she saw her aunt, she went forward to the arms open to receive

her, and first found the passionate relief of tears on her aunt's

shoulder. All thoughts of quiet habitual love, of tenderness for

years, of relationship to the dead,--all that inexplicable

likeness in look, tone, and gesture, that seem to belong to one

family, and which reminded Margaret so forcibly at this moment of

her mother,--came in to melt and soften her numbed heart into the

overflow of warm tears.

Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went down into the study,

where he ordered a fire, and tried to divert his thoughts by

taking down and examining the different books. Each volume

brought a remembrance or a suggestion of his dead friend. It

might be a change of employment from his two days' work of

watching Margaret, but it was no change of thought. He was glad

to catch the sound of Mr. Thornton's voice, making enquiry at the

door. Dixon was rather cavalierly dismissing him; for with the

appearance of Mrs. Shaw's maid, came visions of former grandeur,

of the Beresford blood, of the 'station' (so she was pleased to

term it) from which her young lady had been ousted, and to which

she was now, please God, to be restored. These visions, which she

had been dwelling on with complacency in her conversation with

Mrs. Shaw's maid (skilfully eliciting meanwhile all the

circumstances of state and consequence connected with the Harley

Street establishment, for the edification of the listening

Martha), made Dixon rather inclined to be supercilious in her

treatment of any inhabitant of Milton; so, though she always

stood rather in awe of Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst

be in telling him that he could see none of the inmates of the

house that night. It was rather uncomfortable to be contradicted

in her statement by Mr. Bell's opening the study-door, and

calling out: 'Thornton! is that you? Come in for a minute or two; I want to

speak to you.' So Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon had

to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate herself in her own

esteem by a prodigious story of Sir John Beresford's coach and

six, when he was high sheriff.




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