Mr. Lord will not be down to supper; spread a tray
for him, please."
"I'd like to spread a tray for him at the bottom of the Red Sea; that's
where he belongs!" muttered Bridget, as she descended to the kitchen to
comfort Cyril.
"Was it my fault, mother?" asked Olive, bending over her anxiously.
Her mother drew the child's head down and leaned her own against it
feebly. "No, dear," she sighed. "It's nobody's fault, unless it's mine!"
"Is the pain gone?"
"Quite gone, dear."
Nevertheless the pain was to prove the final wrench to a heart that had
been on the verge of breaking for many a year, and it was not long
before Olive and Cyril were motherless.
Mr. Lord did not have the slightest objection to the growing intimacy
between his children and the new family in the Yellow House, so long as
he was not disturbed by it, and so long as it cost him nothing. They had
strict orders not to play with certain of their village acquaintances,
Mr. Lord believing himself to be an aristocrat; the fact being that he
was almost destitute of human sympathy, and to make a neighbor of him
you would have had to begin with his grandfather and work for three
generations. He had seen Nancy and Gilbert at the gates of his place,
and he had passed Mrs. Carey in one of his infrequent walks to the
post-office. She was not a person to pass without mental comment, and
Mr. Lord instantly felt himself in the presence of an equal, an unusual
fact in his experience; he would not have known a superior if he had met
one ever so often!
"A very fine, unusual woman," he thought.
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