"No," Bessie replied, looking up with more interest in her manner.
"Well, it is," Daisy continued, "and I mean to beard the old woman in her den and conquer a peace. She has heaps of money, the Brownes say, and is greatly respected in spite of her oddities, and is quite an aristocrat in the little place; and, as I suspect, is far above Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, who wishes to show me to her. She does not guess how the old woman hates us all."
And so Daisy rattled on with her small, tiresome talk, to which Bessie sometimes listened and sometimes did not. The Rossiter-Brownes were in Leamington now, but were coming through Wales on their way to Liverpool, and Mrs. Browne and Augusta were to stop for a day or two at the "George" and take Daisy with them when they left.
"I wish we could show them some attention," Daisy said to her daughter. "Don't you think we might manage a French tea in the garden at four o'clock? We have some rare old china and some solid silver and Dresden linen, and we could get Lucy Jones to wait upon us. Do you think we can do it?"
"Perhaps we can," Bessie replied, reflecting that a French tea in the garden at four o'clock meant only thin slices of bread and butter, with biscuits and possibly some little sponge cakes which would not cost much. She could go without a pair of gloves and make the old ones do. All extras came out of poor little Bessie, but she was accustomed to it, and did not mind, and just now she was so glad to have her mother with her, for Daisy, as if a little remorseful for what she was about to do, was unusually sweet and affectionate and kind, and devoted herself to her husband as she had never done since Bessie could remember. She washed his face and hands and brushed his hair, and wheeled him out into the garden under the old yew tree, where he once slept on the summer morning while she kept the sun and the flies from him. And stooping over him, she asked if he remembered the little girl who used to come to him there when he was a boy.
"Yes; that was Daisy," he said, "but I have not seen her in many a year. Where is she now?" and he looked at her in a strange, bewildered way. Then, as the brain fog lifted a little and cleared away, his chin quivered and he went on: "Oh, Daisy, Daisy; it comes back to me now, the years that are gone, and you as you were then. I loved you so much."