“Have you succeeded!’ asked Mrs. Rossitur
while they were gone.
“Yes—that is, a cousin has kindly
consented to come and help me.”
“A cousin!” said Mrs. Rossitur.
“Ay,—we’re in a nest of cousins.”
“In a what, Mr. Rossitur?”
“In a nest of cousins; and I had rather be in
a nest of rooks. I wonder if I shall be expected
to ask my ploughmen to dinner! Every second man
is a cousin, and the rest are uncles.”
Whilst skies are blue and bright.
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.
Shelley.
The days of summer flew by, for the most part lightly,
over the heads of Hugh and Fleda. The farm was
little to them but a place of pretty and picturesque
doings and the scene of nameless delights by wood and
stream, in all which, all that summer, Fleda rejoiced;
pulling Hugh along with her even when sometimes he
would rather have been poring over his books at home.
She laughingly said it was good for him; and one half
at least of every fine day their feet were abroad.
They knew nothing practically of the dairy but that
it was an inexhaustible source of the sweetest milk
and butter, and indirectly of the richest custards
and syllabubs. The flock of sheep that now and
then came in sight running over the hill-side, were
to them only an image of pastoral beauty and a soft
link with the beauty of the past. The two children
took the very cream of country life. The books
they had left were read with greater eagerness than
ever. When the weather was “too lovely
to stay in the house,” Shakspeare or Massillon
or Sully or the “Curiosities of Literature”
or “Corinne” or Milner’s Church History,
for Fleda’s reading was as miscellaneous as ever,
was enjoyed under the flutter of leaves and along
with the rippling of the mountain spring; whilst King
curled himself up on the skirt of his mistress’s
gown and slept for company; hardly more thoughtless
and fearless of harm than his two companions.
Now and then Fleda opened her eyes to see that her
uncle was moody and not like himself, and that her
aunt’s gentle face was clouded in consequence;
and she could not sometimes help the suspicion that
he was not making a farmer of himself; but the next
summer wind would blow these thoughts away, or the
next look of her flowers would put them out of her
head. The whole courtyard in front of the house
had been given up to her peculiar use as a flower-garden,
and there she and Hugh made themselves very busy.
But the summer-time came to an end.
It was a November morning, and Fleda had been doing
some of the last jobs in her flower-beds. She
was coming in with spirits as bright as her cheeks,
when her aunt’s attitude and look, more than
usually spiritless, suddenly checked them. Fleda
gave her a hopeful kiss and asked for the explanation.
