They count Dick Stanesby a good fellow in his county. He is a just landlord, well beloved by his tenants. He is a magistrate and stanchly upholds law and order; and withal he is a jolly good fellow, whose hunting breakfasts are the envy and admiration of the surrounding squires. His wife is pretty too, somewhat insipid perhaps, but a model wife and mother, and always sweet and amiable.
There have been found men who were Goths enough to object to Mrs. Stanesby’s innocent, loving prattle about her eldest boy and her third girl, and the terrible time they had when her second little boy had the measles, and they were so terrified for the first twenty-four hours lest it should turn to scarlet fever; there have been men, I say, who have objected to this as “nursery twaddle,” but their womenkind have invariably crushed them. They believe in Mrs. Stanesby and in Dick Stanesby too.
“Their story is too sweet,” says Ethel De Lisle, his sister’s sister-in-law. “It reminds one that the chivalry of the olden times has not yet died out among true Englishmen. Only think, he loved silently because he was too poor to speak. He went away to Australia, and he worked and waited there all among the blacks and all sorts of low people, and at the end of four years, when his cousin died and left him Heyington, he came back faithful still and he married her. I call it too sweet for words.”.
But Mrs. De Lisle has never met Guy Turner. He is still “riding tracks” on Jinfalla, and consequently she knows nothing of Dick Stanesby’s hutkeeper, or of a solitary grave by the Woonawidgee creek.
My dear, my dear, so you want to know why I am an old maid?
Well, nobody asked me to marry them, I suppose that must have been it.
No? What? You think I must have been pretty. Pretty, was I pretty?
They said I was then, dear, but you see there wasn’t another lady within fifty miles, and that made the difference, just all the difference. You ‘ve a pretty little girl, Hope--it wasn’t fair to have called you Hope, it’s such an unlucky name--but if you’d been young when I was they’d just have raved about you.
Of course I had lovers. Every woman who isn’t downright repulsive has, I think. Willie Maclean doesn’t come here to see me, does he? Ah! I thought--