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Updated: June 23, 2025
At the present moment, in spite of the even good-breeding with which she knitted and chattered beside Marcella, she was in truth consumed with curiosity, conjecture, and alarm on the subject of this Miss Boyce. Profoundly as they trusted each other, the Raeburns were not on the surface a communicative family.
So on the way home there had been a particular zest in his chance encounter with the young man who was likely to give the Raeburns and their candidate so all the world said a very great deal of trouble. The seat had been held to be an entirely safe one for the Maxwell nominee.
At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the young and good-looking private secretary of the other. Both men were agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown beauty. The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story.
"Well, are you going to do it?" said Casey, looking round at him. "Oh, yes!" said Wharton, cheerfully; "oh, yes! we shall do it. We shall settle old Dodgson, I think." "Are the Raeburns as strong as they were?" asked Molloy, who knew Brookshire. "What landlord is? Since '84 the ground is mined for them all good and bad and they know it."
"A little hunting, perhaps," he continued, "and I shall have a villa at Florence. The Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque, don't you think, and quite a lot of people would be able to attach a meaning to the name. And I suppose I must have a hobby; I shall probably collect Raeburns."
She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it what she would say.
Cuthbert walked across the road to his vicarage, still chuckling to himself as he thought of the general discomfiture caused by his question. The musical old gentleman returned to his home revolving a startling new idea; after all, might not the Raeburns and such people be very much like the rest of the world?
Nothing looked out of place, for the room with its gracious proportions took all the incongruities the family Raeburns, the Queen Anne cabinets, the miniatures, the Victorian atrocities, the weak water-colour sketches, the framed photographs of whiskered gentlemen and ladies with bustles, and made them into one pleasing whole.
It was a bleak, chilly afternoon in March, when Charles Osmond, returning from a long round of parish work, thought he would look in for a few minutes at the Raeburns'; he had a proposal to make to Erica, some fresh work which he thought might interest her.
All I know is, Wharton shall be free to use this house just as he pleases during his canvassing, whatever the Raeburns may say." He bent forward and poked the somewhat sluggish fire with a violence which hindered rather than helped it. Mrs. Boyce's smile had quite vanished.
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