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The Jardines were to bring him over this afternoon, and were to stay at Wimperfield for a couple of days. Ida glanced towards the avenue every now and then, expecting to catch a glimpse of the approaching carriage between the leafy elms. Brian strolled by her side with a listless air, smoking, and murmuring a few words now and then for courtesy's sake. He had very little to say to his wife.
Every one else had gone to bed, except Ida, who sat at her window, looking out at the wild windy sky and the forest trees swaying in the gale. The day had been rainy and tempestuous, and the wind was still raging just such a wind as Ida remembered upon Bessie's birthday, the day of that terrible storm which had cost so many lives, and had made Reginald Palliser master of Wimperfield.
Wendover's illness; but it was well to spare him the exposure of these degrading details. Ida felt a strange relief to her spirits, despite the absolute blackness of her domestic horizon, when the carriage drove away from Wimperfield.
The smug town lawyer came down, but not to impound Wimperfield only to read the late baronet's will, which was entirely in harmony with the dead man's easy and generous temper.
The five years he had lived at Wimperfield seemed the greater half of his life seemed, indeed, almost to have absorbed and blotted out his former history. He remembered very little of the shabbier circumstances of his babyhood, and had all the feelings of a boy born in the purple, to whom it was natural to be proprietor of the landscape, and to patronise the humbler dwellers on the soil.
They walked over here to lunch, put the poor little woman in a fluster although they were very pleasant and easy about everything invited me to dinner, tipped the boy munificently, and went off by the night-boat, bound straight for Wimperfield and the partridges. Very fine partridge shooting at Wimperfield!
Four years and more had gone, and there were changes at Wimperfield changes at Kingthorpe. Death had come to the Georgian mansion among the wood-crowned hills.
That's the way the sons of millionaires so often drift towards the gutter. Brian found Wimperfield duller as a place of residence after Sir Reginald's death; or it may be that he found London gayer, and his professional duties more absorbing. It was not often that his wife and mother-in-law were gratified by any public notification of his engagements; but now and then the name of Mr.
This thing had been known in London yesterday afternoon. It was this knowledge which had sent Brian Walford to Kingthorpe to claim his wife. She had suddenly become a wife worth claiming the daughter of Sir Reginald Palliser of Wimperfield. 'You knew this, she repeated, looking at her husband, with infinite scorn expressed in eye and lip. 'No, upon my soul, he answered; 'I left town early.
It was a drive of over thirty miles, only to be done by a merciful man between sunrise and sunset. Mr. and Mrs. Jardine started at five o'clock, breakfasted and lunched on the road, and brought their faithful steed, Drummer Boy, up to the Wimperfield portico at seven in the evening, with not a hair turned. Ida was waiting for them in the portico.
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