Lacey, daughters of a retired British admiral. "How's your father, girls?" she panted.
The "girls," who were sixty-four and sixty-five, exclaimed simultaneously: "Still bedridden, dear Mrs. Whiteoak, but so bright!"
"No right to be bedridden. He's only ninety. How's your mother?"
"Ah, dear Mrs. Whiteoak, Mamma has been dead nine years!" cried the sisters in unison.
"God bless me, I forgot! I'm sorry." She shuffled on.
Now the grin was bestowed on a bent laborer nearly as old as herself, who stood, hat in hand, to greet her, the fringe of silvery hair that encircled his pink head mingling with his patriarchal beard. He had driven Nicholas and Ernest about in their pony cart when they were little boys.
"Good morning, Hickson. Ha! These slats are hard to get over. Grip my arm tighter, Renny! Stop staring about like a fool, Piers, and hang on to me."
The old man pressed forward, showing his smooth gums in a smile of infantile complacence.
"Mrs. Whiteoak, ma'am, I just am wantin' to tell ye that I've got my first great-great-grandchild."
"Good for you, Hickson! You're smarter than I am—I haven't got even one great yet. Don't drag at me, Piers. One would think I was a load of hay—ha! and you a cart-horse. Tell Todd to stop clanging that bell. It's deafening me. Ha! Now for the steps."
Eden and Alayne had fallen in behind Pheasant and Meg, who had Wakefield by the hand. Alayne wondered what the Corys and Rosamund Trent would have thought if they could have seen her at that moment, moving in that slow procession, rather like courtiers behind an ancient queen. Already Alayne felt a family pride in the
