CHAPTER II.

“I HAVE been waiting for you these fifteen minutes,” she said.

“What—you knew I was coming?”

“I heard you, boy. If you choose to whistle ‘Ce que je desire’ through St. Austin’s parish, you may make up your mind to be recognized. Ah! you make me think of my poor children, the one dying, the other nursing him—”

“Don’t!” said the young man, holding up his hand, “it is heart-breaking; I dare not think of them, for my part. Aunt Susan, the missing Austins are not to be found in Cornwall. I went to Bude, as you told me, and found a respectable grocer, who came from Berks, to be sure, and knew very little about his grandfather, but is not our man. I traced him back to Flitton, where he comes from, and found out his pedigree. I have broken down entirely. Did you know that the Farrel-Austins were at it too?”

“At what?”

“This search after our missing kinsfolk. They have just come back, and they look very important; I don’t know if they have found out anything.”

“Then you have been visiting them?” said Miss Susan, bending her head over her knitting, with a scarcely audible sigh; it would have been inaudible to a stranger, but Everard knew what it meant.

“I called—to ask if they had got back, that was all,” he said, with a slight movement of impatience; “and they have come back. They had come down the Rhine and by the old Belgian towns, and were full of pictures, and cathedrals, and so forth. But I thought I caught a gleam in old Farrel’s eye.”

“I wonder—but if he had found them out I don’t think there would be much of a gleam in his eye,” said Miss Susan. “Everard, my dear, if we have to give up the house to them, what shall I do? and my poor Austine will feel it still more.”

“If it has to be done, it must be done, I suppose,” said Everard, with a shrug of his shoulders, “but we need not think of it until we are obliged; and besides, Aunt Susan, forgive me, if you had to give it up to—poor Herbert himself, you would feel it; and if he should get better, poor fellow, and live, and marry—”

“Ah, my poor boy,” said Miss Susan, “life and marriage are not for him!” She paused a moment and dried her eyes, and gulped down a sob in her throat. “But you may be right,” she said in a low tone, “perhaps, whoever our successors were, we should feel it—even you, Everard.”

“You should never go out of Whiteladies for me,” said the young man, “that