Robert Elsmere | Page 4

said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order in them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy Land, and his hair has been out close after a fever. It sounds odd, but I am not curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.'
'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't got that sort of thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he went to college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his mother's peculiarities which seem to be Irish and curious, where his living is, how much it is worth, likewise the color of his eyes, as near as Mrs. Thornburgh can get.'
'What a start you have been getting!' said Agnes lazily. 'But what is it makes the poor old thing so excited?'
Rose sat up and began to fling the fir-cones lying about her at a distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical perfections and the aesthetic freedom of her attire.
'Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment is always seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand before a mine. Mr. Elsmere is the match--we are the mine.'
Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright rippling laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own value, and in no hurry to force an estimate of it on the male world.
'Well,' said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed with her gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, 'there is no saying. "Propinquity does it"--as Mrs. Thornburgh is always reminding us. But where can Catherine be? She went out directly after lunch.'
'She has, gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at the Tysons--at least I heard her talking to mamma about him, and she went out with a basket that looked like beef-tea.'
Rose frowned a little.
'And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see Mrs. Robson instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I dare say I ought--only unfortunately I like my fiddle, and I don't like stuffy cottages, and as for the goody books, I read them so badly that the old women themselves come down upon me.'
'I seem to have been making the best of both worlds,' said Agnes placidly. 'I haven't been doing anything I don't like, but I got hold of that dress she brought home to make for little Emma Payne and nearly finished the skirt, so that I feel as good as when one has been twice to church on a wet Sunday. Ah, there is Catherine, I heard the gate.'
As she spoke steps were heard approaching through the clump of trees which sheltered the little entrance gate, and as Rose sprang to her feet a tall figure in white and gray appeared against the background of the sycamores, and came quickly toward the sisters.
'Dears, I am so sorry; I am afraid you have been waiting for me. But poor Mrs. Tyson wanted me so badly that I could not leave her. She had no one else to help her or to be with her till that eldest girl of hers came home from work.'
'It doesn't matter,' said, Rose, as Catherine put her arm round her shoulder; 'mamma has been fidgeting, and as for Agnes, she looks as if she never wanted to move again.'
Catherine's clear eyes, which at the moment seemed to be full of inward light, kindled in them by some foregoing experience, rested kindly, but only half consciously, on her younger sister as Agnes softly nodded and smiled to her. Evidently she was a good deal older than the other two--she looked about six-and-twenty, a young and vigorous woman in the prime of health and strength. The lines of the form were rather thin and spare, but they were softened by the loose bodice and long full skirt of her dress, and by the folds of a large, white muslin handkerchief which was crossed over her breast. The face, sheltered by the plain shady hat was also a little spoilt from the point of view of beauty by the sharpness of the lines about the chin and mouth, and by a slight prominence of the cheek-bones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish gray, were fine, the nose delicately cut, the brow smooth and beautiful, while the complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonized with the bare stretches and lonely crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once of their gentleness and their severity. She was in her place here, beside the homely Westmoreland house, and