Fernley House

Excerpt

A DUET

"Well, Margaret!"

"Well, Uncle John!"

"Not a word to throw at a dog, as Rosalind says?"

"You are not a dog, Uncle John. Besides, you know all about it without my saying a word, so why should I be silly, and spoil your comfortable cigar? Dear children! They will have a delightful time, I hope; and of course it is perfectly right that they should go to their father when he wants them; and—the summer will pass quickly."

"Very quickly!" Mr. Montfort assented, watching his smoke rings float upward.

"And Peggy is coming; and—oh, we shall be all right, of course we shall; only—we do miss them, don't we, Uncle?"

"I should think we did! A house is a poor place without children; and we flatter ourselves that our two—eh, Margaret?"

"Oh, they are the dearest children in the world," said Margaret with conviction. "There is no possible doubt about that."

She sighed, and took up her work; Mr. Montfort blew smoke rings and watched them melt into the air. There was an interval of sympathetic silence.

The children, Basil and Susan D., Margaret's cousins, had hardly been gone two hours, yet the time seemed already long to Margaret Montfort. Fernley House, which only this morning had been so running over with joy and sunlight, and happy noise and bustle, seemed suddenly to have become a great empty barrack, full of nothing but silence. Margaret, after putting away, sadly enough, the things that the children had left about, had been glad to join her uncle on the pleasant back verandah that overlooked the garden.

Fernley was in the full glory of early summer. The leaves were still young, and too soft to rustle in the gently moving air; the laburnums and honey-locusts were in blossom, and the bees came and went, heavy-laden. The sombre, trailing branches of the great Norway spruces touched the smooth green turf, starred here and there with English daisies. Farther back, the tulip-trees towered stately, and the elm branches swept the crest of the tall box hedges.

Margaret's eyes kept wandering from her work. How could she stitch, when things were looking like this? There was the oriole, swinging on the bough beside his nest, pouring out his song, "Joy! joy! joy!" The eggs might be hatched to-day. Basil had begged her to promise that she would let neither cat nor squirrel meddle with the young birds. What should she do, if she saw a cat up there, forty feet from the ground? Dear Basil! he never could understand why she could not climb trees as well as he and Susan D. Dear Basil! dearest of boys! how nice he looked in his new blue suit; and who would mend the first "barndoor" that he tore in jacket or trousers?

And little Susan D.! the warm clasp of her arms seemed still about Margaret's neck, in that last strangling hug of parting. She had grown so dear, the little silent child! "I will be good," she whispered. "Cousin Margaret, I will try not to die without you, and I will remember the things you told me about papa; but don't make me stay very long, because I haven't got enough goodness to last very long, you know I haven't."

Margaret was roused from her reverie by her uncle's voice....