Angus Egerton shook his head with a slow sad gesture.

‘I am too poor to marry, Mrs. Thatcher,’ he said.  ’What could I offer a wife but a gloomy old house, and a perpetual struggle to make hundreds do the work of thousands?  I am too proud to ask the woman I love to sacrifice her future to me.’

‘Cumber Priory is good enough for any woman that ever lived,’ answered Rebecca Thatcher.  ’You don’t mean what you say, Mr. Egerton.  You know that the name you bear is counted better than money in these parts.’

He laughed, and changed the conversation.

’I heard you young ladies talking a great deal of the Pensildon fete last night,’ he said.

‘Did you really?’ asked Milly; ’you did not appear to be much interested in our conversation.’

’Did I seem distrait?  It is a way I have sometimes, Miss Darrell; but I can assure you I can hear two or three conversations at once.  I think I heard all that you and the Miss Collingwoods were saying.’

‘You are going to Lady Pensildon’s on the 31st, I suppose?’ Milly said.

’I think not.  I think of going abroad for the autumn.  I have been rather a long time at Cumber, you know, and I’m afraid the roving mood is coming upon me again.  I shall be sorry to go, too, for I had intended to torment you continually about your art studies.  You have really a genius for landscape, you know, Miss Darrell; you only want to be goaded into industry now and then by some severe critic like myself.  Is your cousin, Mr. Stormont, an artist, by the way?’

‘Not at all.’

’That’s a pity.  He seems a clever young man.  I suppose he will be a good deal with you, now that Mr. and Mrs. Darrell have returned?’

’He cannot stay very long at a time.  He has the chief position in papa’s counting-house.’

’Indeed!  He looked a little as if the cares of business weighed upon his spirit.’

He glanced rather curiously at Milly while he was speaking of Mr. Stormont.  Was he really going away, I wondered, or was that threat of departure only a lover-like ruse?

The rain came presently with all the violence usual to a thunder-shower.  We were prisoners in Mrs. Thatcher’s cottage for more than an hour; a happy hour, I think, to Milly, in spite of the closeness of the atmosphere and the medical odour of the herbs.  Angus Egerton stood beside her chair all the time, looking down at her bright face and talking to her; while Mrs. Thatcher mumbled a long catalogue of her ailments and troubles into my somewhat inattentive ear.

Once while those two were talking about his intended departure I heard Mr. Egerton say,

’If I thought any one cared about my staying—­if I could believe that any one would miss me ever so little—­I should be in no hurry to leave Yorkshire.’