“Thank you, John,” she said; “I hope I shall see so much of you in London.  It will be so nice to have an old Guestwick friend near me.”  She had her own voice, and the pulses of her heart better under command than had he; but she also felt that the occasion was trying to her.  The man had loved her honestly and truly,—­still did love her, paying her the great homage of bitter grief in that he had lost her.  Where is the girl who will not sympathise with such love and such grief, if it be shown only because it cannot be concealed, and be declared against the will of him who declares it?

Then came in old Mrs Hearn, whose cottage was not distant two minutes’ walk from the Small House.  She always called Mrs Dale “my dear,” and petted the girls as though they had been children.  When told of Lily’s marriage, she had thrown up her hands with surprise, for she had still left in some corner of her drawers remnants of sugar-plums which she had bought for Lily.  “A London man, is he?  Well, well.  I wish he lived in the country.  Eight hundred a year, my dear?” she had said to Mrs Dale.  “That sounds nice down here, because we are all so poor.  But I suppose eight hundred a year isn’t very much up in London?”

“The squire’s coming, I suppose, isn’t he?” said Mrs Hearn, as she seated herself on the sofa close to Mrs Dale.

“Yes, he’ll be here by-and-by; unless he changes his mind, you know.  He doesn’t stand on ceremony with me.”

“He change his mind!  When did you ever know Christopher Dale change his mind?”

“He is pretty constant, Mrs Hearn.”

“If he promised to give a man a penny, he’d give it.  But if he promised to take away a pound, he’d take it, though it cost him years to get it.  He’s going to turn me out of my cottage, he says.”

“Nonsense, Mrs Hearn!”

“Jolliffe came and told me”—­Jolliffe, I should explain, was the bailiff,—­“that if I didn’t like it as it was, I might leave it, and that the squire could get double the rent for it.  Now all I asked was that he should do a little painting in the kitchen; and the wood is all as black as his hat.”

“I thought it was understood you were to paint inside.”

“How can I do it, my dear, with a hundred and forty pounds for everything?  I must live, you know!  And he that has workmen about him every day of the year!  And was that a message to send to me, who have lived in the parish for fifty years?  Here he is.”  And Mrs Hearn majestically raised herself from her seat as the squire entered the room.

With him entered Mr and Mrs Boyce, from the parsonage, with Dick Boyce, the ungrown gentleman, and two girl Boyces, who were fourteen and fifteen years of age.  Mrs Dale, with the amount of good-nature usual on such occasions, asked reproachfully why Jane, and Charles, and Florence, and Bessy, did not come,—­Boyce being a man who had his quiver full of them,—­and Mrs Boyce, giving the usual answer, declared that she already felt that they had come as an avalanche.