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Updated: June 28, 2025
Ascott come in there suddenly, white and trembling. Once, so agitated was she, that Elizabeth had brought her a glass of water; and instead of being angry or treating her with the distant dignity which she had always kept up her mistress had said, almost in the old Stowbury tone, "Thank you, Elizabeth."
No loftier; Stowbury being well supplied with first class schools, and having a vague impression that the Misses Leaf, born ladies and not brought up as governesses, were not competent educators except of very small children. Which was true enough until lately.
We might have made him better if we had kept him at Stowbury. But he is young; that is my hope of him; and he was always fond of his aunts, and is still, I think." Hilary smiled sadly. "Deeds, not words I don't believe in words." "Well, let us put aside believing, and only act. Let us give him another chance." Hilary shook her head. "Another, and another, and another it will be always the same.
And yet with that instinct which comes to almost every human soul, fast departing, Mrs. Ascott's white lips whispered, "Pray." Elizabeth had no words, except those which Miss Leaf used to say night after night in the little parlor at Stowbury. She knelt down, and in a trembling voice repeated in her mistress's ear "Our Father which art in heaven" to the end. After it Mrs. Ascott lay very quiet.
In his premature and not specially comely middle age, in his gray hairs, in the painful, anxious, half melancholy expression which occasionally flitted across his features, as if life had gone hard with him, Robert Lyon was a thousand times dearer to her than when the world was all before them both in the early days at Stowbury.
He began to talk not of Stowbury, that was tacitly ignored by both but of London, and then of "my house in Russell Square," "my carriage," "my servants" the inconvenience of keeping coachmen who would drink, and footmen who would not clean the plate properly; ending by what was a favorite moral axiom of his, that "wealth and position are heavy responsibilities."
If on the day she first saw in church it was Mr. Lyon's grave, heavy-browed, somewhat severe face for he was a Scotsman, and his sharp, strong Scotch features did look "hard" beside the soft, rosy, well conditioned youth of Stowbury if on that Sunday any one had told Hilary Leaf that the face of this stranger was to be the one face of her life, stamped upon brain and heart, and soul with a vividness that no other impressions were strong enough to efface, and retained there with a tenacity that no vicissitudes of time, or place, or fortunes had power to alter, Hilary would yes, I think she would have quietly kept looking on.
Also there was about Miss Balquidder a certain dry humor essentially Scotch neither Irish "wit" nor English "fun," but Scotch humor; a little ponderous perhaps, yet sparkling: like the sparkles from a large lump of coal, red-warm at the heart, and capable of warming a whole household. As many a time it had warmed the little household at Stowbury for Robert Lyon had it in perfection.
It was almost as quiet a day as that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday at Stowbury. They went a long walk together, in the course of which Mr. Lyon forced her to agree to what hitherto she had steadfastly resisted, that she and Johanna should accept from him enough, in addition to their own fifty pounds a year, to enable them to live comfortably without her working any more.
She would have liked to see the lad again; have liked to talk over with him Stowbury things and Stowbury people; but she felt she ought not, and she would not. "Tell me where you live, Tom, and that will do just as well; at least till I speak to my mistress. I never had a visitor before, and my mistress might not like it." "No followers allowed, eh?" Elizabeth laughed.
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