Part 48 (2/2)

Hartley's”? She always talks of _Mr._ Richards, the butcher!'

Simultaneously with this unanswerable query about her, Nanny herself appears with a note in her hand, which she has been commissioned by Lady Roupell to give to Miss Lambton, and which, when she is once more alone--the children having scampered off to embrace Alfred--Miss Lambton opens. She does so with some slight curiosity. The envelope is so large as to imply the certainty of an enclosure. Milady's own notes are not apt to require much s.p.a.ce, nor is the present one any exception to her general rule. It runs thus:

'DEAR PEGGY,

'This woman has asked me to forward you the enclosed. I do not quite know why she could not find out your address for herself.

Freddy has worried me into saying I would go. It is such a long while off that we shall probably all be dead and buried first.

Meanwhile, do not order a fly, as I can take you and Prue.

'Yours, 'M. R.'

With a heightened interest Peggy turns to the enclosure. It reveals a large and highly glazed invitation card, on which Mrs. Hartley announces her intention of being 'At Home' on the evening of the 15th of September, and which holds out the two lures--each lurking seductively in its own corner--of 'Theatricals' and 'Dancing.' While she is still looking at it, Prue comes up behind her and reads it over her shoulder; and as she does so, the elder sister hears her breathe quicker.

'Oh, Peggy!' she cries, with agitation, 'then I shall see her at last. I shall be able to judge for myself. It is so odd that we should never have met her, living in the same neighbourhood; it shows how little we go out, does not it? _He_ has always been so anxious that we should know her, almost ever since he knew her himself. How long is that ago?'

stifling a sigh. 'Oh, a long time ago now! He says he is always trying to make the people he likes clasp each other's hands.'

'And is he very successful generally?' asks Peggy drily.

But Prue's eyes have lit upon Lady Roupell's note, and her attention is too much absorbed in it for her even to hear her elder's sarcastic question. Peggy would fain have spared her the pain of reading the sentence that refers to Freddy. But it is too late. Margaret becomes aware of the moment when she reaches it by the slight colour that rises to her eager face.

'He was always so good-natured about the Hartleys,' she says, in hasty explanation; 'he would have been just the same to any one else in the same position. He thought that people left them out in the cold; he never can bear any one to be left out in the cold.'

'This does not look much like being left out in the cold, does it?' says Margaret, rising, walking to the chimney-piece, and setting up the card against the dark background of the old oak; 'since it is our only invitation, it is well that it is such a smart one. What an odd fas.h.i.+on it is, when one comes to think of it, that a woman should consider it necessary to send these magnificent bits of pasteboard flying half over the country, merely to tell us that she is at home!'

'There is no need for us to do that,' rejoins Prue rather disconsolately; 'we are always at home.'

'We shall not be at home on the night of the 15th of September,' says Peggy, laughing, and pa.s.sing her arm fondly round her sister, who, unable to keep away from the magnet of Mrs. Hartley's invitation, has followed it to the fireplace.

'The 15th of September,' repeats the other, dismayed; 'is it possible that it is not till the 15th of September? Oh, what a long time off! How I wish that I could fall asleep now, and only wake up on the very morning!'

Peggy sighs. There is to her something terrible in her sister's eagerness, knowing, as she does, how little it has in common with the wholesome hearty hunger for pleasure of her age. But she speaks cheerfully:

'The play will be the better acted; the floor will be the better waxed.'

'I am sure that it was _he_ who reminded them to ask us; I am sure that they would never have remembered us but for _him_,' pursues the young girl, colouring with pleasure. 'He used to say--indeed,' still further brightening, 'he said it again not so long ago, that he always felt a sensation of emptiness about a room that I was not in.'

'Oh, Miss Lambton!' cries Franky, bursting into the room, and bringing with him a somewhat powerful agricultural odour, 'we have been having _such_ fun! we have been helping Alfred to fork manure. Nanny is _so_ cross; she is coming after me--oh, do not let her find me! do hide me somewhere!'

But unfortunately Master Harborough's attendant is able to track him by another sense than sight, and from the shelter of Peggy's petticoat, magnanimously extended to protect him, he is presently drawn forth, and carried off, in company with his sister, to a purification profoundly deprecated by both.

For the next four weeks the Hartley card of invitation remains enthroned in the place of honour on Peggy's chimney-piece. Festivities are not so rife in the neighbourhood of the little Red House that it runs any risk of being dethroned, or of even having its eminence shared. Freddy has been affectionately taxed by his betrothed with having been instrumental in its despatch, but he has delicately denied.

'I always think,' he says prettily, 'that there is a magnet in the heart of all good people, drawing them towards each other; so that you see, dear, there was no need for me.'

The magnet of which he speaks must be in great force in his own case just now, judging by the frequency with which the ten long miles--always charged by the flymen as eleven--between the Manor and the home of the Hartleys are spanned by him. Prue does not always hear from himself of these excursions, though, indeed, he makes no great secret of them.

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