There was an appreciable pause before Dick asked, "Well, should you object so much to that?"
"Of course I should," said the Squire, "--for you. I shouldn't mind in the case of Humphrey, if she wasn't too old, and had enough money for the pair of them. I'm not going to pay any more of his debts. I'm sick of it."
Dick allowed the conversation to travel down this byroad for a time, and when the Squire brought it back to the original track, said, "Well, I'll think over what you say. But I don't know that I should care, now, about marrying a young girl."
The Squire turned this over in his mind, looking down on his plate, and his brows came together. "What do you mean?" he asked shortly. "You wouldn't want to marry an old woman."
Dick took his cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it.
"When I marry," he said decisively, "it will probably be a woman of nearer thirty than twenty."
The Squire made the best of it. "Oh, well--as long as she's not over thirty," he said. "Girls don't marry so young as they used to. But--well, you must think of an heir, Dick."
Dick made no reply to this, and the conversation ended.
Miss Bird arose on the next morning to find her window glazed with frost, and it was characteristic of her and of the house in which she had lived for over thirty years that her first thought was, "No hunting to-day"; although the deprivation could not be expected to hold any disappointment for herself, or indeed to affect her in any way.
Her second thought marked a drop to the sombre uneasiness in which she had spent wakeful hours during the night. She would not rise many more times in this familiar room, nor look out on to a scene which she had come to know so well at all seasons of the year that she could not help loving it. She would have liked to see the trees of the park, for a farewell, in their early June dress, the grass about them powdered with the yellow of buttercups. But she hoped so to see them again. She had been made to feel that she was parting from friends, that she was by virtue of her long and faithful service part of the family, that she would not lose them altogether. The Squire had said the day before, when he had made known to her that he had heard of her projected departure, "You must come and see us, you know, Miss Bird. The house won't be like itself without you."