“We’ll fill the house with visitors for the shooting season, Lolly, darling,” said Mr. Mellish. “If they come on the 1st of September, they’ll all be comfortably settled for the Leger. The dear old Dad will come of course, and trot about on his white pony like the best of men and bankers in Christendom. Captain and Mrs. Bulstrode will come too; and we shall see how our little Lucy looks, and whether solemn Talbot beats her in the silence of the matrimonial chamber. Then there’s Hunter, and a host of fellows; and you must write me a list of any nice people you’d like to ask down here; and we’ll have a glorious autumn; won’t we, Lolly?”
“I hope so, dear,” said Mrs. Mellish, after a little pause, and a repetition of John’s eager question. She had not been listening very attentively to John’s plans for the future, and she startled him rather by asking him a question very wide from the subject upon which he had been speaking.
“How long do the fastest vessels take going to Australia, John?” she asked quietly.
Mr. Mellish stopped with his glass in his hand to stare at his wife as she asked this question.
“How long do the fastest vessels take to go to Australia?” he repeated. “Good gracious me, Lolly, how should I know? Three weeks or a month—no, I mean three months; but, in mercy’s name, Aurora, why do you want to know?”
“The average length of the voyage is, I believe, about three months; but some fast-sailing packets do it in seventy, or even in sixty-eight days,” interposed Mrs. Powell, looking sharply at Aurora’s abstracted face from under cover of her white eyelashes.
“But why, in goodness name, do you want to know, Lolly?” repeated John Mellish. “You don’t want to go to Australia, and you don’t know anybody who’s going to Australia.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Mellish is interested in the Female Emigration movement,” suggested Mrs. Powell: “it is a most delightful work.”
Aurora replied neither to the direct nor the indirect question. The cloth had been removed (for no modern customs had ever disturbed the conservative economy of Mellish Park), and Mrs. Mellish sat, with a cluster of pale cherries in her hand, looking at the reflection of her own face in the depths of the shining mahogany.
“Lolly!” exclaimed John Mellish, after watching his wife for some minutes, “you are as grave as a judge. What can you be thinking of?”
She looked up at him with a bright smile, and rose to leave the dining-room.
“I’ll tell you one of these days, John,” she said. “Are you coming with us, or are you going out upon the lawn to smoke?”
“If you’ll come with me, dear,” he answered, returning her smile with the frank glance of unchangeable affection which always beamed in his eyes when they rested on his wife. “I’ll go out and smoke a cigar, if you’ll come with me, Lolly.”
“You foolish old Yorkshireman,” said Mrs. Mellish, laughing, “I verily believe you’d like me to smoke one of your choice cigars, by way of keeping you company.”
“No, darling, I’d never wish to see you do anything that didn’t square—that wasn’t compatible,” interposed Mr. Mellish, gravely, “with the manners of the noblest lady, and the duties of the truest wife in England. If I love to see you ride across country with a red feather in your hat, it is because I think that the good old sport of English gentlemen was meant to be shared by their wives, rather than by people whom I would not like to name; and because there is a fair chance that the sight of your Spanish hat and scarlet plume at the meet may go some way towards keeping Miss Wilhelmina de Lancy (who was born plain Scroggins, and christened Sarah) out of the field. I think our British wives and mothers might have the battle in their own hands, and win the victory for themselves and their daughters, if they were a little braver in standing to their ground; if they were not quite so tenderly indulgent to the sins of eligible young noblemen, and, in their estimate of a man’s qualifications for the marriage state, were not so entirely guided by the figures in his banker’s book. It’s a sad world, Lolly; but John Mellish, of Mellish Park, was never meant to set it right.”
Mr., Mellish stood on the threshold of a glass-door which opened on to a flight of steps leading to the lawn, as he delivered himself of this homily, the gravity of which was quite at variance with the usual tenor of his discourse. He had a cigar in his hand, and was going to light it, when Aurora stopped him.
“John, dear,” she said, “my most unbusinesslike of darlings, have you forgotten that poor Langley is so anxious to see you, that he may give you up the old accounts before the new trainer takes the stable business into his hands? He was here half an hour before dinner, and begged that you would see him tonight.”
Mr. Mellish shrugged his shoulders.
“Langley’s as honest a fellow as ever breathed,” he said. “I don’t want to look into his accounts. I know what the stable costs me yearly on an average, and that’s enough.”
“But for his satisfaction, dear.”
“Well, well, Lolly, tomorrow morning, then.”
“No, dear, I want you to ride out with me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow evening.”
“You ‘meet the Captains at the Citadel,’ ” said Aurora, laughing; “that is to say, you dine at Holmbush with Colonel Pevensey. Come, darling, I insist on your being businesslike for once in a way; come to your sanctum sanctorum, and we’ll send for Langley, and look
