There! run away to the children in the
orchard, and leave the lawn clear."
Bessie accepted her dismissal gladly, thankful to escape the
catechetical ordeal that would have ensued had there been leisure for
it. She was almost as shy of the rector's wife as of the rector. Mrs.
Wiley had a brusque, absent manner, and it was a trick of hers to expose
her young acquaintance to a fire of questions, of which she as regularly
forgot the answers. She had often affronted Bessie Fairfax by asking her
real name, and in the next breath calling her affably Bessie Carnegie,
the doctor's step-daughter, niece or other little kinswoman whom he kept
as a help in his house for charity's sake.
Bessie had but faint recollections of the rectory as her home, for since
her father's death she had never gone there except as a visitor on
public days. But the tradition was always in her memory that once she
had lived in those pleasant rooms, had run up and down those broad sunny
stairs, and played on the spacious lawns of that mossy, tree-shadowed
garden. In the orchard had assembled, besides the children, a group of
their ex-teachers--Miss Semple and her sister, the village dressmakers,
Miss Genet, the daughter at the post-office, and the two Miss
Mittens--well-behaved and well-instructed young persons whom Mr. Wiley's
predecessors had been pleased to employ, but for whom Mrs. Wiley found
no encouragement. She had the ordering of the school, and preferred
gentlewomen for her lay-sisters.
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