The mansion
would seem smaller to her, doubtless, beholding it with the eyes of
womanhood, than childish memory made it. But to live there with her father,
to wait upon him and tend him, to have Hyacinth's children there, playing
in the gardens as she had played, would be as happy a life as her fancy
could compass.
All that she knew of the march of events during those tranquil years in
the convent came to her in letters from her sister, who was a vivacious
letter-writer, and prided herself upon her epistolary talent--as indeed
upon her general superiority, from a literary standpoint, to the women of
her day.
It was a pleasure to Lady Fareham in some rare interval of solitude--when
the weather was too severe for her to venture outside the hall door, even
in her comfortable coach, and when by some curious concatenation she
happened to be without visitors--to open her portfolio and prattle with
her pen to her sister, as she would have prattled with her tongue to the
visitors whom snow or tempest kept away. Her letters written from London
were apt to be rare and brief, Angela noted; but from his lordship's
mansion near Oxford, or at the Grange between Fareham and Winchester--once
the property of the brothers of St.
Pages:
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62