Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
He felt sure his aunt could not fail to be taken with Hester if only she saw her in fit surroundings: with her the frame was more than half the picture. He was glad now that she had not consented to call on the family in Addison Square: they would be of so much more importance in her eyes in the setting of Yrndale.
At Yrndale things went on in the same dull way, anger burrowing like a devil-mole in the bosom of the father, a dreary spiritual fog hanging over all the souls, and the mother wearying for some glimmer of a heavenly dawn. Hester felt as if she could not endure it much longer as if the place were forgotten of God, and abandoned to chance.
Presently he rose and left the room. His wife followed him. The moment she entered his study behind him he turned and took her in his arms. "Here's news, wifie!" he said. "You'll be just as glad of it as I am. Yrndale is ours after all! at least so my old friend Heron says, and he ought to know! Cousin Strafford left no will. He is certain there is none.
But the stranger of this world makes the very home by his presence feel out of doors. A letter came from lord Gartley, begging Mrs. Raymount to excuse the liberty he took, and allow him to ask whether he might presume upon her wish, casually expressed, to welcome his aunt to the hospitality of Yrndale.
You must help him to be good, for that is the chief duty of every one towards a neighbour, and particularly of a wife towards a husband." Amy was crying afresh, and made no answer; but there was not the most shadowy token of resentment in her weeping. In the meantime things had been going very gloomily at Yrndale. Mrs. Raymount was better in health but hardly more cheerful.
"There will be more occasion than ever," answered his father: "will there not be the more to look after when I am gone? What do you imagine you could employ yourself with down there? You have never taken to study, else, as you know, I would have sent you to Oxford. When you leave the bank it will be to learn farming and the management of an estate after which you will be welcome to Yrndale."
He walked with an enlargement of strut as he went home through the park, and swung his cane with the air of a man who had made a conquest of which he had reason to be proud. The hot dreamy days rose and sank in Yrndale. Hester would wake in the morning oppressed with the feeling that there was something she ought to have begun long ago, and must positively set about this new day.
On the Sunday evening, the last before she was to leave for Yrndale, Hester had gone to see a poor woman in a house she had not been in before, and was walking up the dismal stair, dark and dirty, when she heard a moaning from a room the door of which was a little open. She peeped in, and saw on a low bed a poor woman, old, yellow, and wrinkled, apparently at the point of death.
The major left Yrndale the next morning, saying now there was Mark to attend to, his room was better than his company. Vavasor would stay a day or two longer, he said, much relieved. He could not go until he saw Mark fairly started on the way of recovery.
The major was still at Yrndale, when, in the gloomy month to which for reasons he had shifted his holiday, Cornelius arrived. The major could hardly accept him as one of the family, so utterly inferior did he show. There was a kind of mean beauty about his face and person and an evident varnish on his manners which revolted him. "That lad will bring grief on them!" he said to himself.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking