United States or Pakistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She was not old enough to go and live at Normanstand without exciting comment; and the Squire absolutely refused to allow that his daughter should live anywhere except in his own house. Educational supervision, exercised at such distance and so intermittently, could neither be complete nor exact.
But the comfort which Aunt Laetitia could give was of a more positive kind. From that hour Miss Rowly stayed at Normanstand. Stephen wanted her; and she wanted to be with Stephen. After the funeral Harold, with an instinctive delicacy of feeling, had gone to live in his own house; but he came to Normanstand every day.
Leonard, half awake, and not half of that half master of himself, answered: 'I said I will make you agent of Normanstand when I marry Stephen. Harold grew cold. To hear of any one marrying Stephen was to him like plunging him in a glacier stream; but to hear her name so lightly spoken, and by such a man, was a bewildering shock which within a second set his blood on fire.
Of course it may not be necessary to show her the receipt; but if it should ever be advisable it is always there. He looked at her with anger, not unmixed with admiration, as, bowing rather lower than necessary, he went out of the door, saying sotto voce, between his teeth: 'When my turn comes out you go! Neck and crop! Quick! Normanstand isn't big enough to hold us both!
You really must, for my heart is set on this. I assure you I am not doing it merely to please myself. I have thought over the whole matter. Father has always wished me to be in a position a position of knowledge and experience to manage Normanstand if I should ever succeed him.
When they had returned to Normanstand, the Squire took an early opportunity of bringing Harold alone into his study. He spoke to him with what in a very young man would have seemed diffidence: 'I have been thinking, Harold, that the time has come when you should be altogether your own master.
Stephen, which was the parish church of Normanstand, had a peculiar interest for the Norman family. There, either within the existing walls or those which had preceded them when the church was rebuilt by that Sir Stephen who was standard-bearer to Henry VI., were buried all the direct members of the line.
When he took ship in the Dominion, a large cargo-boat with some passengers running to London, he had a vague purpose of visiting in secret Norcester, whence he could manage to find out how matters were at Normanstand. He would then, he felt, be in a better position to regulate his further movements. He knew that he had already a sufficient disguise in his great beard.
Stephen had so long been accustomed to consulting him about everything that there was no perceptible change in their relations. Even necessary business to be done did not come as a new thing. And so things went on outwardly at Normanstand very much as they had done before the coming of the tragedy.
In the process of years, however, the shadow over Norman's life had begun to soften; when his baby had grown to be something of a companion, they met again. Norman, 'who had never since his wife's death been able to tear himself, even for a night, away from Normanstand and Stephen, wrote to his old friend asking him to come to him.
Word Of The Day