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Updated: July 16, 2025
This was the way they kept Sunday at the Dugdales'. It was something new to Agatha, and she liked it much. She threw herself into the domestic ways as if she had been used to them all her life, and specially made herself popular with the father and the little ones.
Probably I shall have done by the time the Dugdales come. You are quite sure there was a will?" "Quite sure; you will probably find it in the cabinet. I saw him looking there the very afternoon of the day he died. I was calling him to dinner, but his back was turned, and I could not make him understand poor father!"
Agatha turned away, and went to sit by the window and watch the chrysanthemums. At last she was attracted back by her husband's voice. "This is the will, I see, by the endorsement. Take it, Agatha; we will not touch it till the Dugdales come. And here are more letters to my father. Do you think I ought to burn them or look them over first?" The confidential tone in which he spoke soothed Agatha.
Seeing this, the husband appeared contented and at ease. They and the Dugdales rode merrily into Kingcombe, much to that good town's astonishment. The equestrian quartette at Marmaduke's door was a sight that the worthy inhabitants of that sleepy street would not get over for a week.
She asked an infinitude of questions, her bright quick eyes seeming to extort and gain more than the mere verbal answers. She talked a good deal, throwing more light than Agatha had ever before received on the manners, characters, and history of the Harper family, the Dugdales, and Anne Valery.
Accordingly the Bedloes, Dangerfields, Dugdales, Turberviles, made haste to transfer their industry to an employment at once more profitable and less perilous than any to which they were accustomed. Till the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament Popish plots were the chief manufacture. Then, during seven years, Whig plots were the only plots which paid.
The answer to that question involved so much, both of what had been, and what was yet to come, that Agatha dared not ponder over it. "Mrs. Harper! Mrs. Harper!" She mused no longer, but hurried on after the Dugdales. It was not to point out the Castle that Harrie had been so vociferous, but to show a place which she evidently deemed far more interesting.
"Except on market-days, we rarely see more street passengers than now in Kingcombe," Aline Valery answered, smiling. "You will get accustomed to that and many other things when you are a country lady. Now, shall we drive to the Dugdales, or look first at the two houses I told you of?" Mr. Harper preferred the latter course, under fear, his wife merrily declared, of being circumvented by Mrs.
Her husband, pleased at her gaiety, came to lift her off her horse. "Not a bit of it!" Mrs. Dugdale cried. "Keep your seat, Agatha; no time to lose; on we go in a minute, when Duke has been to get his letters. Here, Brian, my pet." There had rushed out round her horse a cluster of infantine Dugdales. "Lift Brian up here, Uncle Nathanael, and I'll give him a canter. Bravo!
Aided by the beneficial influence of dinner, which in the Dugdales' house seemed to have the mysterious property of extending over an indefinite time, Agatha had succeeded in making friends with her "nephews" to say nothing of a lovely little niece, who would persist in putting chubby arms round "Pa's" neck, and dividing his attention sorely between Free-trade and rice-pudding. Mr.
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