It was in the middle of the long summer days, and we rambled about through the gardens, and orchards, and shrubberies where we had played as little children, and laughed over the remembrance of our childish tricks and troubles. Then there was that long talk with grandmamma, and afterwards with Bobby, in her room. When Lottie and I found ourselves alone together just at bed-time, how much we had to say! It seemed to me a little difficult to talk over all her affairs, though when, after some time, she called upon me to admire my two tall cousins, I was quite ready to do so. Yet my own rosy, round-faced, romping schoolboy brother was much more in my thoughts now.
I don't think I had ever known till now that my mother was grandmamma's eldest child, so it had never struck me that, now that dear uncle was gone, Bobby, and not Harry, would be master of Beecham Park! How strange it did seem! I thought of the funny boy's blushing awkwardness when grandmamma had told him, and then of his confession to me that "it was a horrid bore, he had so meant to be a discoverer, and get lost in Africa like Dr. Livingstone; and now, he supposed, he couldn't!" And just before I went to sleep that night I thought of his last words about it a few hours ago, as he threw his strong arm over my shoulder:--
"I say, Sis, it'll be ever so long first--that's one comfort!--but if ever I do have to come and live here, you'll come too, won't you? Then you can see after it all, you know, and then it won't be quite so bad!"
Should I? Would Beecham ever be my real home? And Jane--Jane down at the Lodge with her three rosy, tidy little daughters. Wasn't this just what she said years ago when she first brought me to Beecham? "What if Master Bobby should grow up some day to find it all his own, and he the lord of it all!"
So it had come to pass, and Beecham, dear beautiful Beecham, was to be really _ours_!
That was a dozen years ago, my small friends; how funny it seems now!
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