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All the court officials crowded her apartments in the palace. Chesterfield, young Churchill, Lord Hervey, Lord Scarborough, all hurried to the tea-table of the well-bred bedchamber-woman, to escape the dreary duties and monotonous moping of attendance on the throne.
The duke attended Miss Churchill, not for the sake of besieging her with soft flattering tales of love, but, on the contrary, to chide her for sitting so ill on horseback: She was one of the most indolent creatures in the world; and although the maids of honour are generally the worst mounted of the whole court, yet, in order to distinguish her, on account of the favour she enjoyed, they had given her a very pretty, though rather a high-spirited horse; a distinction she would very willingly have excused them.
I know not whether this raillery caused him to reflect for what reasons he had made his choice; but it is certain he began to cool in his affections for Miss Churchill; and perhaps he would entirely have abandoned this pursuit, had not an accident taken place, which raised in him an entirely new inclination for her.
He found Lady Cecilia playing with Beauclerc; Miss Stanley was looking on. Churchill was a famous billiard-player, and took his turn to show how much better than Beauclerc he performed, but this day his hand was out, his eye not good; he committed blunders of which a novice might have been ashamed. And there was Miss Stanley and there was Beauclerc by to see! and Beauclerc pitied him!
But Roscoe, knowing as little as the rest of man-kind of the terrible famines of the northern people, which keep an area one-half as large as the whole of Europe down to a population of thirty thousand, went on. A famine, he argued, would give him greater opportunity for study. Two weeks later he was at York Factory, and from there he continued to Fort Churchill, farther up on Hudson's Bay.
Their names were, John and Emily Shepherd, James and Caroline Churchill, Eliza Careful, and Fanny Fairchild. The usual compliments being over, the following conversation ensued. Emily. Bless me, Henrietta, where did you get that pretty squirrel. Henrietta. Ay, where now do you think I got that pretty squirrel? Why, Emily, if I was to tell you to guess a hundred times, you would never find it out.
Their boy had her curly brown hair, her sensitive mouth, above all, her clear-gazing, truthful grey eyes, eyes in which there was never a shadow of falsehood or faltering. Joey Churchill was sitting on a stone bench in his aunt's kitchen yard, holding one of his black-stockinged knees between his small, brown hands.
It was true that she had not to charge herself, in this instance as in the former, with being the sole and original author of the mischief; with having suggested such feelings as might otherwise never have entered Harriet's imagination; for Harriet had acknowledged her admiration and preference of Frank Churchill before she had ever given her a hint on the subject; but she felt completely guilty of having encouraged what she might have repressed.
Half an hour later four dogs, a sledge, and a man were moving swiftly through the dead and silent gloom of Arctic day. Sergeant MacVeigh was on his way to Fort Churchill, more than four hundred miles away. This is the loneliest journey in the world, the trip down from the solitary little wind-beaten cabin at Point Fullerton to Fort Churchill.
It was his first thought, then, what a woman this mountain maid would make, and his second that "King" Plummer should continue to look upon her as his daughter she was too young to be his wife. Nor was Churchill proof against her beauty and her blandishments. He felt suddenly that for her sake he could overlook some of Mr. Grayson's faults, or at least seek to amend them.
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