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This observation was not lost on the busy-bodies and scandal-mongers who abounded in Franchope, as they do in most country- towns, where there is not so much of active business stirring as will furnish sufficient material for gossip to those who love to act as unpaid news-agents in publishing their neighbours' real or supposed more private doings from house to house.
From a first-class carriage there emerged three persons the colonel, an elderly lady, and a young man who might be some twenty years of age; a footman and a lady's-maid also made their appearance; and all drove off for Riverton Park. Who could count the pairs of eyes that looked out from various windows in Franchope as the carriage drove rapidly through the town?
Adjoining the Riverton estate, in the direction of Franchope, was, as has been already stated, the property of the elderly Miss Stansfield, whose niece, Mary, has been introduced to our readers. The old lady was an early caller on the colonel's family, having made a special effort to rouse herself to pay the call, as she rarely left her own grounds.
She had been left behind in England, in the family of a maiden aunt, her father's sister, who lived on her own property, which was situated between the Riverton estate and the town of Franchope.
So Franchope and its neighbourhood were content, and watched the arrivals at the station day by day with patient interest. At length, in the first week in August, it was observed that the colonel's carriage drew up at the railway office to meet the evening train from London.
Everybody said it was a shame, but as no one had a right to interfere, the broad, white front of Park House continued to look across the public road to Franchope through its surroundings of noble trees, with a sort of pensive dignity, its walls being more or less discoloured and scarred, while creepers straggled across the windows, looking like so many wrinkles indicative of decrepitude and decay.
Curiosity was on tiptoe in the small country-town of Franchope and the neighbourhood when it was settled without a doubt that Riverton Park was to be occupied once more.
The master came in a pony-cart from Franchope, and returned in the same the moment the afternoon school broke up, so that his scholars had ample opportunity, when he was fairly gone, to settle any little disputes which might have arisen during school hours by vigorous fights on the open green, the combatants being usually encouraged to prolong their encounters to the utmost by the cheers of the men who gathered round them out of the neighbouring beer-shops.
"Perhaps it may be so," said the other, laughing. "Well, do you remember what Shakespeare says?" asked the old man. "`How far that little candle throws its beams, So shines a good deed in a naughty world. "Now, I want you kindly to answer me a question. It is this, Are there any unselfish people in Franchope or the neighbourhood?"
About a mile and a half from the Park, on the side that was farthest from Franchope, lived Mr Arthur Wilder, a gentleman of independent means, with a wife, a grown-up son, and three daughters.
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