It was amusing--it might even be said ridiculous--when Lady Penton, the little ceremonial being over and an hour or so of quiet having elapsed, drew up all the blinds again solemnly with her own hands, going from window to window.
“They will have got back to Penton by this time,” she said, in a tone perceptibly more cheerful. “You can tell Mary to take the children out for their walk; by this time it will be all over. And the affairs of life must go on, whatever happens,” she added, with a little sigh.
The sigh was for the trouble over, the cheerfulness for the life to come. They were both quite simple and true. She herself took a little walk afterward, still with much gravity, round the garden, in which Mab, in her character as a philosophical observer, took pains to accompany her.
“But you never knew Sir Walter Penton, did you?” she asked.
“Yes, I knew him, but not well. We went there a few times when we were newly married. After the death of the sons they rather turned against Edward. It was a pity, but I never blamed them.”
“Why should they have turned against him? it was not his fault.”
“My dear,” said the gentle woman, quietly, “you are not old enough to understand.”
Mab looked at her with those keen little eyes, which twinkled and sparkled with curiosity, and which to the little girl’s own apprehension were able to look through and through all those simple people. But even Mab was daunted by this gentle and undoubting superiority of experience.
Lady Penton resumed quietly, speaking more to herself than to her companion, “I hope she will not feel it now--not too much to listen. I hope she may not prove more proud than ever.”
She shook her head as she went slowly along, and Mab could not divine what she was thinking. They went together to the bench under the poplar-tree, where the weathercock which was over the Penton stables caught the red gold of the westering sun, and blazed so that it looked like a sun itself, stretching brazen rays over the dark and leafless woods.
“Do you think she could be happy living anywhere else?” Lady Penton said at last.
“She--who? Do you mean Aunt Gerald? Oh, yes, to be sure, when she knows it isn’t hers. And my uncle hates it.”
“Your uncle!” Lady Penton repeated. And then she said, after a time, “I don’t think she could be happy in any other house.”