The door, Miss Lawson. Good-afternoon, ladies."
"You must not judge of Miss Jocund as a milliner and nothing more," her
chaperone instructed Bessie when they had left the shop. "She is a lady
herself. Her father was Dr. Jocund, the best physician in Norminster
when you could find him sober. He died, and left his daughter with only
debts for a fortune; she turned milliner, and has paid every sixpence of
them."
Where were they to go next? Bessie recollected that her uncle Laurence
lived in the vicinity of the minster, and that she had an errand to him
from her grandfather. She had undertaken it cheerfully, feeling that it
would be a pleasure to see her kind uncle Laurence again. There was a
warmth of geniality about him that was absent from her uncle Frederick
and her grandfather, and she had decided that if she was to have any
friend amongst her kinsfolk, her uncle Laurence would be that friend.
She was sure that her father, whom she barely knew, had been most like
him.
It was not far to Minster Court, and they directed their steps that way.
The streets of Norminster still preserve much of their picturesque
antiquity, but they are dull, undeniably dull, except on the occasion of
assizes, races, fairs, and the annual assembling of the yeomanry and
militia. Elections are no more the saturnalia they used to be in the
good old times. Bessie was reminded of Bayeux and its sultry drowsiness
as they passed into the green purlieus of the minster and under a
low-browed archway into a spacious paved court, where the sun slept on
the red-brick backs of the old houses.
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