"Pain me?" said Angela. "To stay here--in Richard's home?"
"Would you dislike it?" asked Mrs. Luttrell.
The girl came to her side, and put her arms round the mother's neck. Mrs. Luttrell's face softened curiously as she did so; she laid one of her hands upon Angela's shining hair with a caressing movement.
"Dislike it? It would be my only happiness," said Angela. She stopped, and then went on with soft vehemence--"To think that I was in his house, that I looked on the things that he used to see every day, that I could sometimes do the thing that he would have liked to see me doing--it is all I could wish for, all that life could give me now! Yes, yes, let us stay."
"It's perhaps not so good for you as one might wish," said Mrs. Luttrell, regarding her tenderly. "You had perhaps better have a change for a time; there is no reason why you should live for ever in the past, like an old woman, Angela. The day will come when you may wish to make new ties for yourself--new interests----"
"'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee,'" she murmured in the words of the widowed Moabitess, "'for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God...'"
Mrs. Luttrell clasped her in her arms and kissed her forehead. Then after a little pause she said to Brian--
"I will make all necessary arrangements with Mr. Colquhoun, and send him to you," he said. "I think there is nothing else about which we have to speak?"
"Except Hugo. As I am going away from home for so long I think it would be better if I settled a certain sum in the Funds upon him, so that he might have a moderate income as well as his pay. Does that meet with your approval?"
"My approval matters very little, but you can do as you choose with your own money. I suppose you wish that this house should be kept open for him?"
"That is as you please. He would be better for a home. May I ask what Angela thinks?"
"Oh, yes," said Angela, lifting her face slowly from Mrs. Luttrell's shoulder. "He must not feel that he has lost a home, must he, mother?" She pronounced the title which Mrs. Luttrell had begged her to bestow, still with a certain diffidence and hesitancy; but Mrs. Luttrell's brow smoothed when she heard it.