“Oh, Lily,” said Bell.

“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Crosbie.  It was Bernard’s fault.  Bernard, I never will come into a hayfield with you again.”  And so they all became very intimate; while Bell sat quietly under the tree, listening to a word or two now and then as Mr Crosbie chose to speak them.  There is a kind of enjoyment to be had in society, in which very few words are necessary.  Bell was less vivacious than her sister Lily; and when, an hour after this, she was dressing herself for dinner, she acknowledged that she had passed a pleasant afternoon, though Mr Crosbie had not said very much.

CHAPTER III

The Widow Dale of Allington

As Mrs Dale, of the Small House, was not a Dale by birth, there can be no necessity for insisting on the fact that none of the Dale peculiarities should be sought for in her character.  These peculiarities were not, perhaps, very conspicuous in her daughters, who had taken more in that respect from their mother than from their father; but a close observer might recognise the girls as Dales.  They were constant, perhaps obstinate, occasionally a little uncharitable in their judgment, and prone to think that there was a great deal in being a Dale, though not prone to say much about it.  But they had also a better pride than this, which had come to them as their mother’s heritage.

Mrs Dale was certainly a proud woman,—­not that there was anything appertaining to herself in which she took a pride.  In birth she had been much lower than her husband, seeing that her grandfather had been almost nobody.  Her fortune had been considerable for her rank in life, and on its proceeds she now mainly depended; but it had not been sufficient to give any of the pride of wealth.  And she had been a beauty; according to my taste, was still very lovely; but certainly at this time of life, she, a widow of fifteen years’ standing, with two grown-up daughters, took no pride in her beauty.  Nor had she any conscious pride in the fact that she was a lady.  That she was a lady, inwards and outwards, from the crown of her head to the sole of her feet, in head, in heart, and in mind, a lady by education and a lady by nature, a lady also by birth in spite of that deficiency respecting her grandfather, I hereby state as a fact—­meo periculo.  And the squire, though he had no special love for her, had recognised this, and in all respects treated her as his equal.

But her position was one which required that she should either be very proud or else very humble.  She was poor, and yet her daughters moved in a position which belongs, as a rule, to the daughters of rich men only.  This they did as nieces of the childless squire of Allington, and as his nieces she felt that they were entitled to accept his countenance and kindness, without loss of self-respect either to her or to them.  She would have ill done her duty as a mother to them