The squire was already in the little lobby, and, cutting short good-byes, he strode down the Close, while Charlotte ran back twice, to kiss her aunt and say in a tearful voice:
"I cannot endure to leave you, sweet auntie."
"Good-bye, my treasure, good-bye," Miss Falconer repeated again and again, and very genuine tears were on her own cheeks. They were a very demonstrative pair, and, as we should say in these days, "gushed" over each other, but real love did underlie the fanciful expression of it; and Miss Falconer looked on Charlotte with the pride that a modeller in plastic clay, looks upon the work of his hands, and remembers how carefully every detail has been wrought out, and how, in spite of a little flaw here and there, the result is satisfactory.
Joyce was watching for her father at the door of Mr. Scott's farm, and came running down the garden between the lavender bushes and high shrub-fuschias, which were glowing scarlet in the sunshine.
The squire waved his hand to the farmer's wife, who, crippled with rheumatism, could not leave her seat in the porch to come towards him. A farmboy lifted Joyce's box to the back seat, where she soon mounted with a quick, alert spring, and then, with a shilling handed to the boy, the squire drove off.
Joyce's heart sank a little when they turned in at the gates of Barley Wood.
"No, no, my dear; I must get back as fast as I can. It is a good many miles for Mavis at a stretch."
They drew up at the door, and an old servant answered the ringing of the bell, which Joyce had jumped down to pull by a handle, made of a deer's foot. The servant's face was not very pleasant, and a forbidding looking woman called out:
"Company! yes, there's nothing but company. There's no rest from it."
The boxes were taken down, and the squire, unwilling to prolong the parting, which he felt more keenly than he cared to own, waved his whip, and saying "Good bye, my Sunshine, good-bye," drove off.
"This way," the woman said, passing across the hall and opening the door of a low, pretty room, sweet with that scent of rose leaves and lavender, which always belonged to the atmosphere of a country house long ago. It was an aroma in which many scents blended, with no very great strength--a fragrance which dwells in the memory amongst the pleasant things of early days.