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Updated: June 13, 2025
Tea and coffee served but little to produce cordiality amongst the female portion of the guests after their flight to the drawing-room. Lady Horsingham and Lady Banneret talked apart on a sofa; they were deep in the merits of their respective preachers and the failings of their respective maids. Mrs. Marmaduke and Mrs.
Breakfast dull, and most of the party cross: Aunt Horsingham is generally out of humour at breakfast-time, particularly on Sundays. Cousin Amelia suggested my towels were too coarse: "they had rubbed a colour into my cheeks like a dairymaid's." John said I looked like a rose a tea-rose, he added, as I handed him his cup.
Down went my window in a twinkling, out went my candles the wick of the second one would keep glimmering like a light far off at sea and in came Aunt Horsingham, clad in flannel attire, with a wondrous head-dress, the like of which I have never beheld before or since, just as I popped into bed, and buried myself beneath the clothes as if I had been asleep for hours.
Aunt Deborah drew herself up and she really is very formidable when she gets on her high horse and looked first at me, and then at Frank, and then at me again; and I blushed like a fool, and hesitated, and introduced "Captain Lovell" to "My aunt, Miss Horsingham!" and I didn't the least know what to do next, and had a great mind to make a bolt for it and run upstairs.
"I don't recollect a much finer morning at this time of year," he resumed, addressing Cousin John after a pause, during which he had ceremoniously shaken hands with each of us in succession. "Will you have some breakfast?" asked Lady Horsingham, whose cold and formal demeanour contrasted strangely with the nervous excitement of her visitor.
When the horrified husband looked down into the darkness, a wisp of white garments, a bruised and lifeless body, was all that remained of Lady Horsingham. That night one half of Dangerfield Hall was consumed by fire. Its mistress was said to have perished in the flames.
I never give in to Aunt Horsingham after all she's not my own aunt so I answered as pertly as ever I could: "No: you mean I don't spend the morning in looking in the glass and talking evil of my neighbours; I don't scream when I see a beetle, or go into convulsions because there's a mouse in the room.
Aunt Horsingham received us as usual with a freezing smile. "How do you do, Kate?" said she, putting two of her cold bony fingers into my hand. "I'm afraid you will find it rather dull here after London; but it is wholesome for young people to be occasionally sobered a little."
"I'm going down to Wales for a few days' shooting, Kate," was his reply. "I shall come back again when the frost breaks up if Lady Horsingham will be good enough to receive me." Aunt Horsingham is always very civil to John, and so is Cousin Amelia. People generally are to young bachelors. I wonder why men ever marry; they are so much more in request without wives and children.
There was not a soul to be seen but our two selves. All at once he stopped short under the light of a lamp and looked me full in the face. "Kate," said he, in a grave, deliberate voice, "you know what I mean Yes or No?" I shook like a leaf. What would I have given to have been able to take counsel of one of my own sex Mrs. Lumley, Aunt Deborah, or even cold, pitiless Lady Horsingham!
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