Miss Merivales Mistake | Page 5

the dining-room, and tea is quite ready. Next time you go to London, I mean to go with you."
The dining-room looked a picture of comfort, with the curtains drawn, and the table laid for tea. Miss Merivale never had late dinner except when she gave a dinner party. She liked the simple, old-fashioned ways she had been accustomed to in her youth. But the table was laid with dainty care; the swinging lamps shone upon shining silver that had been in the family for two hundred years, on an old Worcester tea-set that had been bought by Miss Merivale's grandmother, on bowls of early spring flowers gathered by Rose that morning from the beautiful old garden at the back of the house. Everything in the room spoke of long years of quiet prosperity. As Miss Merivale took her accustomed seat at the tea-table and looked about her, and then at Tom sitting opposite her, all unwitting of the terrible blow that might be about to fall on him, she could scarcely keep back the sob that rose to her lips.
Tom met her glance without seeing the trouble in it, and he smiled cheerfully back at her.
"Well, how did the shopping get on?" he asked, "Did you remember the seeds, Rose?"
Rose gave him a guilty look. "Oh, Tom, I quite forgot. Did you want them?"
He looked vexed for a moment, but only for a moment. "It does not matter. I can write. I promised Jackson he should have them this week. Cousin Ann has a wonderful show of anemones this year, Aunt Lucy. The square bed in the back garden is brilliant with them. We must try them here again next year. I don't intend to be satisfied till we have beaten Cousin Ann."
"She says the soil here doesn't suit anemones; they are fanciful flowers," returned Miss Merivale. "Then you went to Broadhurst, Tom?"
"Yes, I just managed it. Old Mrs. Harding was there. She is failing very fast, poor old soul. Part of the time she thought I was Cousin James, Aunt Lucy. She wanted to know when I heard last from my sister Lydia."
Miss Merivale put her cup down with a little clatter. Her hand had begun to tremble. "You are very much like James, Tom," she said, glancing at the portrait that hung on the wainscoted wall just above him, "and you get more like him every day."
It was the portrait of her only brother she was looking at. Tom and Rose were her cousin's children, though they called her aunt. She had adopted them when Rose was a baby and Tom a sturdy lad of five. Woodcote had been their home ever since. Tom had grown up knowing that the estate was to be his at Miss Merivale's death. James Merivale had died young, ten years before his father; and Lydia, Miss Merivale's only sister, had married against her father's wishes, and had been disowned by him. After vainly trying to gain his forgiveness, she and her husband emigrated to Australia, and for some years nothing was heard of them. Then Lydia wrote to her father, telling him that she was a widow, and begging him to send her money that she might come home. The stern old man burnt the letter without answering it and without showing it to his daughter Lucy, and the next news came in a letter written by Lydia to her sister.
She had married again, her husband's partner, James Sampson, and had a little daughter, whom she had named Rhoda, after her mother. The letter asked for money, and Miss Merivale sent what she could, though she had little to send, for her father demanded a strict account of all she spent.
She gave him the letter to read, and he returned it to her without a word; but his heart must have relented towards his disobedient daughter at the last, for by a codicil to his will it was provided that at Miss Merivale's death Woodcote was to pass to Lydia, or, in the event of her not surviving her sister, to her daughter Rhoda.
But poor Lydia never knew that her father had forgiven her. She died three days before him; and when her sister's letter reached Australia, James Sampson had broken up his home in Melbourne and started with his little daughter for a distant settlement. He never reached the settlement, and all Miss Merivale's efforts to trace him proved fruitless. She at last accepted the belief of the lawyers that he had lost his way, and, like so many other hapless wanderers, had perished in the bush.
When Tom had become dear as a son to her, fears would sometimes rise that his claim to Woodcote might one day be disputed; but as the quiet years went on these fears ceased to