"Come inside, Tommy," he said. "Let us mingle our tears together. You
ungrateful young sweep, how dare you cry! She kissed you!"
Nell, of the tender heart, had grown somewhat fond of Beaumont
Buildings, and she sighed rather wistfully as she looked back at it, and
thought of the humble friends who would, she knew, miss her; but her
spirits rose as the train left the tops of the houses and carried Dick
and her into the fresh air of the great Hampshire downs.
"It seems years, ages, since I saw the country!" she exclaimed. "Dick,
do you see those sheep? They are white! Think of it! Think of the grimy
ones in the parks! Couldn't we have a Society for Washing the Poor
London Sheep, Dick? And look at that farmhouse! Oh, Dick, it isn't
Devonshire and--and Shorne Mills, but it is the country at last!"
"All right; keep your hair on, young woman," said Dick, looking out of
the window in a patronizing fashion. "This is all very well; but wait
until you get to Anglemere. Then you can shout and carry on if you
like. Old Bardsley--nice old chap when he steps off his perch--says it
is one of the most delightful 'seats' in England; as if it were a kind
of armchair! Lucky beggar, this young lord! Nell, I've a kind of feeling
that I ought to have been the heldest son of an hearl, but that I was
changed in the cradle, don't you know. I should advise you not to stick
your head too far out of the window, or one of these tunnels will knock
it off. A brainless sister I can bear with, but one without any head at
all would be rather too much."
He was pretty jubilant himself, though, boylike, he tried to play the
cynic; and when the ramshackle fly drove through the picturesque
village, and they came in sight of a huge palace of a house which
gleamed redly through the trees of an English park, and the flyman,
pointing with his whip, informed them that it was Anglemere, Dick
emitted a whistle of surprise and admiration.
"I say, that is something like! What signifies the Maltbys' and the
other places we know, after that?"
But Nell's eyes, after a glance at the great house, were fixed upon the
lodge at which the fly had stopped.
"Oh, Dick, how pretty!" she exclaimed, her beautiful face radiant with
delight as she gazed at the ivy-covered little house with its latticed
windows and Gothic porch.