For the first time Gillian began to see Dolores as Uncle Reginald used
to know her, free from that heavy mist of sullen dislike to everything
and everybody. It seemed to bring them together, but, in spite of
Bessie's charms, they both continually missed Mysie, out of doors and
in, in schoolroom and drawing-room, and, above all, in Dolly's bedroom.
She seemed to be, as Gillian told Bessie, 'a sort of family cement,
holding the two ends, big and little, together;' and Bessie responded
that her elder sister Susan was one of that sort.
The evenings now were quite unlike the usual ones. Dinner was late,
and the two girls came down to it. Afterwards the young ones sat round
the fire in the hall, where Bessie, who was a wonderful story-teller,
kept Fergus and Valetta quiet and delighted, either with invented tales
or histories of the feats of her own brothers and sisters, who were so
much older than their Silverton first cousins as to be like an elder
generation.
When the two young ones were gone to bed, the others came into the
drawing-room, where mamma and grandmamma were to be found, either going
over papa's letters, or else Mrs. Merrifield talking about her
Stokesley grandchildren, the same whose pranks Bessie had just been
telling, so that it was not easy to believe in Sam, a captain in the
navy. Harry and John farming in Canada, David working as a clergy-man
in the Black Country, George in. a government office, Anne a
clergyman's wife, and mother to the great grandchildren who were always
being compared to Primrose, Susan keeping her father's house, and
Sarah, though as old as Alethea, still treated as the youngest--the
child of the family.
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