Many messages passed between the Rectory and the Cottage the next morning on the subject of the visit to the Hall. How shall we go? Would it be best to get the fly, as there is a prospect of rain? Would it do to go in the pony-carriage, as the clouds were making a lift? Finally, when the sun came out, would it be best to walk? Emmy and Florry Plowden were running to and fro all the morning with notes and messages. Emmy (who was going) was anxious and serious on this great subject. It would be such a pity to get wet. ‘It is true it is nearly the end of the winter, and our dresses are not in their first freshness; but it is so disagreeable to go into a new house feeling mouldy and damp. First impressions are of so much consequence. Don’t you think so, aunt? and Mrs. Swinford is Parisian, and accustomed to everything in the last fashion.’

‘You might as well go draggled as not,’ said Florence, ‘if that is what you are thinking of: for she will see there is not much of the last fashion about you.’

‘Aunt always looks as if she were the leader of the fashion wherever she goes,’ said Emily proudly. She it was who was conscious of being the only one who was like her aunt.

‘Thank you for such a pretty compliment,’ said Lady William; ‘but Florry is right, I am sorry to say. We shall all be so much below her standard at our best, that a little more or less doesn’t matter. Still, without reference to Mrs. Swinford or her impressions, it is unpleasant to get wet.’

‘Then you vote for the fly,’ said Emmy with satisfaction, ‘that is what I always thought you would do. One does not get blown about, one comes out fresh, without having one’s hair all wild and marks of mud upon one’s shoes. Thanks, Aunt Emily, you always decide for what is best.’

In an hour, however, they returned, Florry, who was not going, leading the way. ‘Mamma thinks as it’s so much brighter our own pony-chaise will do. It’s much nicer being in the air than boxed up in a fly. And she thinks it would make so much fuss, setting all the village talking, if the fly was ordered, and it was known everywhere that she was going to the Hall.’

‘I thought she wished it to be known.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Emmy, who was the aggrieved party, ‘mamma wishes everything to be known. She says a clergyman’s family should always live in a glass house and all that sort of thing. And to have the pony-chaise out, and everybody seeing where we are going, will be just the same thing.’

‘At all events it’s your own private carriage, and not a nasty hired fly,’ said Florence. ‘“Mrs. Plowden’s carriage at the door,” and you needn’t explain it’s a shandrydan.’

And the unfeeling girl laughed, as was her way: for it was not she who was going to have her fringe disarranged, and the locks at the back blown about by driving in the pony-carriage in the whistling March breeze.

‘Tell your mother I think the pony-chaise will do quite well if she likes it; everybody knows what sort of a carriage a country clergyman can afford to keep.’

‘But you are not a country clergyman, Aunt Emily.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ that lady said.

Next time it was Emily alone who ran ‘across,’ as they called it. ‘Mamma thinks on the whole we might walk. The roads have dried up beautifully, and it’s not far. And walking is always correct in the country, isn’t it, aunt?’

‘It is always correct anywhere, Emmy, when you have no other way to go.’

‘Ah, but we have two other ways to go! There is the fly, which I should prefer, as it protects one most, and there’s our own pony-chaise. It cannot be supposed to be for the want of means of driving, Aunt Emily, if we pleased.’

‘Of course not,’ said Lady William with great gravity. ‘And there is a gipsy van somewhere about. I have always thought I should like to drive about the country in a gipsy van.’

Emmy gave her aunt a look of reproach: but by this time her sister had arrived with Mrs. Plowden’s ultimatum. ‘If the sun comes out mamma will call for you at the door, if you will please to be ready by three; but if it is overcast she will come in the fly. So that is all settled, I hope.’

Mab had maintained a great calm during all these searchings of heart. She was not going, and had she been going it would have been a matter of the greatest indifference to her, consciously a plain, and what is still more dreadful to the imagination, a fat girl, whether her hair was blown about or not, and what first impression Mrs. Swinford or even Leo Swinford might form of her. As for Leo Swinford, indeed, in face of the fact that he had called at the Cottage the night before, she felt for him something of that familiarity which breeds contempt: and how it could matter to anybody what he thought was to Mab’s youthful soul a wonder not to be expressed.

‘What are you so anxious about, after all?’ she said. ‘If your hair is untidy, what of that? Everybody in Watcham knows exactly how your hair looks, Emmy, whether it is just newly done and tidy, or whether it is hanging about your ears.’

‘I hope it never hangs about my ears,’ said Emmy primly, yet with indignation. If there was one thing upon which she prided herself, it was the tidiness in which she stood superior over all her peers.

‘Oh, I’ve seen it, after an afternoon at tennis, just as wild as other people’s,’ said Mab, ‘and everybody in the village has seen it too.’

‘But then,’ said the other sister, ‘these are not people in the village; they’re new people, and there’s a great deal in a first impression—at least, so Emmy thinks.’

‘A first impression—upon whom?’ said Mab, with all the severity of her age. Seventeen, being as yet scarcely in it, is a severe critic of the ages over twenty which are in possession of the field.

There was a pause, which Florence broke by one of her disconcerting laughs.

‘Mab, you are too much of a baby. Don’t you know the Swinfords are going to entertain? Perhaps you don’t know what that means. They are going to give all sorts of parties, and we’ll not be asked if—we don’t please.’

‘Whom?’ said Mab again.

And then there came another laugh from Florence, and an offended ‘What can you mean, Mab? Mrs. Swinford, to be sure. It is only she who could invite girls to make the house pleasant, and,’ said Emily, with a little dignity, ‘it is as much for you as for me.’

‘Oh! I thought it might be Leo Swinford,’ said the audacious Mab, ‘who wants a wife, mother says. But he says himself no, he doesn’t want anything of the kind.’

‘Mab!’ said Lady William, in a warning tone from behind.

‘He didn’t say it in any secret,’ said Mab, ‘not the least. He didn’t tell you “But this is between ourselves,” or “You won’t mention it,” or anything of the kind, as people say when they confide in you. He said it right out.’

‘Who said it right out?’ cried Emily. It was their turn to question now, and they looked at each other after they had looked, in consternation, at Mab—asking each other, with their eyes, awe-stricken, what could this little minx mean, and how did she know?

‘As for Leo Swinford, I don’t think anything at all of him,’ said Mab. ‘He was got up in a fur coat yesterday, when it was not cold at all, only blustering; and he had shiny shoes on and red socks showing, as if he were got up for the evening—to walk about the Watcham roads.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ said Emily severely, crushing these pretensions in the bud, ‘that you have seen Mr. Swinford, Mab? And how did you know it was Mr. Swinford—it might have been some excursionist or other down here by a cheap train.’

‘A Marshall and Snelgrove young man,’ said Florence. ‘Absurd! red socks and evening shoes and a fur coat.’

‘And we have always understood Mr. Swinford was a gentleman,’ Emily said. ‘But it is not at all wonderful at Mab’s age to take up such a foolish idea. For a new person in the village always looks as if there was an adventure behind him, doesn’t he, aunt?—and Mab is such a child still.’

‘However,’ said Lady William, ‘I don’t know how it came about, but it was Leo Swinford, my dear. I knew him very well when he was a child, and he sought me out because, I suppose, he didn’t know any one else here.’

There was another pause of consternation and disappointment: for to think that Mab had seen this new personage before any of them, and that he had seen Mab, was very disconcerting and disagreeable to these young ladies. But then they reflected that Mab did not count—a little fat, roundabout thing, looking even younger than her age, and that if it was ordained that they should be forestalled by any one, better Mab than another. The horrid little thing! But then it was a good sign for future intimacy that he knew Aunt Emily, and had come in this way at once to her house.

‘I am sure,’ said Emmy, ‘he might have come to the Rectory. Papa would have been very glad to see him, and the clergyman is generally the first person—unless when there is a squire. And of course he is the squire himself. But then Aunt Emily is the highest in rank, everybody knows.’

‘My rank had not much to do with it. All that Leo knows of me was as Emily Plowden, the Rector’s daughter, just as you are now, Emmy,’ said Lady William, with a little laugh. She was going out of the room as she spoke, and turned her head to give them one glance from the door. If it occurred to Lady William that the second Emily Plowden was not precisely like the first, she did not give vent to that opinion. But it was a little ludicrous from her point of view to be told, as she was told so often, that Emily was ‘her very image’—‘just what I remember you at her age.’ It was with, perhaps, a little glance of satire in her eyes that she flung this parting word at her niece. But the Emily Plowden of the present generation understood no jest. She blushed a little with conscious pleasure and pride, and threw up her head. Now, Lady William had a throat like a swan, but Emily’s could be described no otherwise than as a long neck, at the top of which her head jerked forward with a motion not unlike the darting movement of a hen.

‘So you have really seen him, Mab? Think of having a man, a real man, a young man in Watcham! Were you much excited? Had you presence of mind enough to note any particulars as to eyes and hair and height, and so forth—as well as the red socks and the shiny shoes?’

‘Oh, he’s fair, I think,’ said Mab indifferently, ‘a sort of no-coloured hair like mine, and the rest to correspond. He was very talky and jokey with mother, just as if she had been a young lady. But he said little to me.’

‘It was not to be expected,’ said Emily, ‘that a gentleman and a man of the world like Mr. Swinford would find much to say to you; and I wonder that he should have remembered Aunt Emily. I have never heard that men like that cared much for old ladies: but no doubt it was because he knew nobody else, and just to pass the time.’

‘Mother is not an old lady,’ said Mab; ‘if I were a man I should like her better than all of you girls put together. You are, on the whole, rather silly things. You don’t talk out of your own heads, but watch other people’s eyes to see what will please them. I don’t call that talking! You never would have found out what would please that man if you had looked into his eyes for a year. Now mother never minds—she says what comes into her head: and if any one contradicts her she just goes on saying the other thing.’

This somewhat vague description seemed to make a certain impression upon the young ladies, who probably were able to fill up the outlines for themselves. Emily gave a little sigh.

‘Conversation’s quite a gift,’ she said, ‘and it’s always difficult with a new person till you know their tastes. I suppose Mr. Swinford knows about pictures and that sort of thing, and unless you’ve somebody to tell you when you go to the exhibitions it’s so hard to know which are really the good ones. Then books—Mudie never sends us any of the best. He puts all the common novels into the country parcels. At the Hall they will get everything that comes out.’

‘He said nothing about books or pictures either,’ said Mab—‘Yes, by the bye, he’s going to lend mother some—but they’re French ones——’

‘French ones!’ said the cousins; and then there was a pause of consternation. ‘Papa once said if he had his will no French novel should ever come into the parish.’

‘Ah!’ said Mab, ‘but then I suppose Mr. Swinford didn’t write and ask uncle what he should bring.’

Emily remained gazing out of the window with a troubled air.

‘We shall never know what to say if that is the sort of thing; and as for going to their parties, if they are all made up of—— Mamma, too, who never read a French book in her life. We had a little practice in the schoolroom, when we had FrÄulein, don’t you remember, Flo—— Who was it we read? It was all long speeches, and one could never make out what they were about.’

‘And they sounded exactly like German when FrÄulein read them. I never could tell which was which. But I know where the books are, and perhaps if you learned one of the speeches and said it to Mr. Swinford, he might like it, don’t you know.’

‘I was not, of course, thinking of Mr. Swinford, but of Mrs. Swinford,’ said Emily, frowning.

‘And you think you will get a chance of talking to her with mamma and Aunt Emily there?’

‘Well,’ said Emily, ‘at least I can show her that I know my place, and how an English girl behaves.’

‘I wish you would not wrangle,’ said Mab; ‘it was rather fun listening to mother and him: they said no speeches out of books—I believe after all what they said was chiefly chaff. Mother is a wonderful hand at chaff. She looks so quiet all the time, and goes on till you are nearly jumping. But he liked it, and laughed, and gave her as good. There was one thing he said,’ added Mab demurely, ‘which wasn’t chaff, and which you might like to hear. He said at once he didn’t want——’

‘What! I’m sure I don’t care what he wants or doesn’t want—a gardener perhaps? and papa has just heard of one he wanted to recommend.’

‘A wife!’ cried Mab, her blue eyes quickening a little with mischief. ‘Mother asked if he did, and he said he didn’t. Perhaps she had some one she wanted to recommend.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Florence, coming to her sister’s aid; ‘that is the way in France, the parents arrange it all. I shouldn’t mind at all—that. I give my consent. It would be nice to be the bride’s relations and always about the house. If you’ll promise to ask nice people and always us to meet them—and be kind about sending the carriage for us, and that sort of thing, for papa hates a bill for flys—I shall give my consent.’

‘Me!’ cried Mab, indignant, ‘I would not marry Leo Swinford, not if—— I’d rather marry the silliest of the curates. I’d rather——’ She stopped short breathless, unable to find a stronger alternative.

‘Then what a good thing for you,’ said Florry, ‘that he doesn’t want a wife!’

‘If you think it is nice,’ said Emily, ‘for young girls to talk about gentlemen, and whether they want wives or not, as if wives were sold at the shop at so much a pound—I am not of that kind of mind: and Aunt Emily would not like it any more than mamma. Good-bye, you two. I have got to go home and get ready, whatever you may have to do.’

And thus Emily retired with the honours of war. If there was any one who had formed plans on the subject of Leo Swinford it was she; not plans, indeed, which are dreadful foreign things, but just a floating idea such as an English girl might entertain, that if a young man and a young woman are thrown much together, why, then certain consequences might follow. One never could tell what might happen, as Mrs. Plowden herself, who was the very essence of propriety, did not hesitate to say.