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It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell.
Hale had been reckoning up with dismay how much their removal and fortnight at Heston had cost, and he found it had absorbed nearly all his little stock of ready money. No! here they were, and here they must remain. At night when Margaret realised this, she felt inclined to sit down in a stupor of despair.
"We had tea at Heston," Christine said. She ran into the house. Kettering looked at the elder girl. "You would not come," he said. "Don't you care for motoring?" "No." She came down the steps and stood beside him. "Mr. Kettering, may I say something?" He looked faintly surprised. "May you! Why, of course!" "You will be angry you will be very angry, I am afraid," she said.
Heston, said the teacher; 'but the child insisted, and I knew that it must come sooner or later. And so, said she, I told her it was because she was colored. "'Is that all. Poor child, she didn't know, that, in that fact lay whole volumes of insult, outrage, and violence.
'But Dixon, and the girl we are to have to help? 'Oh, wait a minute. I am overpowered by the discovery of my own genius for management. Dixon is to have let me see, I had it once the back sitting-room. I think she will like that. She grumbles so much about the stairs at Heston; and the girl is to have that sloping attic over your room and mamma's. Won't that do? 'I dare say it will.
Roger and Herbert French had been trying to get a brace or two of partridges on the long-neglected and much-poached estate; and on the way home French expressed a hope that, now they were to settle at Heston, Roger would take up some of the usual duties of the country gentleman. He spoke in the half-jesting way characteristic of the modern Mentor.
He did not even know which attic it was that had been reserved at the time of the letting of Heston, and now held some of the old London furniture and papers. Well, he must manage it, "burgle" his own house, if necessary. What an absurd situation! Should he consult his mother? No; better not. That evening General Hobson was expected for a couple of nights.
I made up my mind, she continued, that I would leave the place, and when my husband came home, I said, 'Heston, let us leave this place; let us go farther west. I hear that we can have our child educated there, just the same as any other child. At first my husband demurred, for we were doing a good business; but I said, let us go, if we have to live on potatoes and salt.
He came and saw, and the sight threw him off his balance, for he broke out into a torrent of explanations and excuses, from which in time I extracted the following facts: It appeared that ever since she was a child, Miss Heston had been addicted to drinking fits, and that it was on account of this constitutional weakness, which was of course concealed from me, that she had been allowed to engage herself to a penniless subaltern.
Ida gave an exclamation of astonishment, and the Colonel started, while the Squire, looking at him curiously, waited to hear what he had to say. "It is perfectly true, Mr. Cossey," he answered, "that I was engaged twenty years ago to be married to Miss Julia Heston, though I now for the first time learn that she was your aunt.
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