illar." The movement threatened to deposit her cap
on the carpet behind her, but she recovered it in time, and took up the
thread of her discourse by quoting the much-prized family
distinction--"There was your Aunt Penny, who married into the county."

"Oh! are you at that humbug?" he cried, with a man's disrespectful
impatience. "I thought it had seen its day, and was long over and done
with. I could not have conceived that you--" ("were such a fool," he was
going to say, when he caught himself up.) He was quick-tempered and
impulsive, but he was also suave by nature, and his long habit of
courteous indulgence to his wife caused him to alter the phrase. "I did
not know that you had so lively an imagination as to persist in
believing that old myth, Maria."

"But your Aunt Penny did marry one of the Beauchamps of Waylands,"
insisted Mrs. Millar.

"Certainly; and she made the poorest marriage of anybody that I have
ever had to do with, though I have always understood that he was not a
bad sort, beyond being as thick-headed as his brother the squire or an
officer of dragoons. He get on at the bar! I dare say not. And he was no
quicker-witted or longer-sighted in Australia. You must have heard me
say how grieved I was once when I came across a fellow from Sydney who
had been up the country, and remembered something of the Beauchamps and
their straits. They were regularly hard up, and went through no end of
trouble. Poor Aunt Penny seldom had a woman-servant--women-servants were
more difficult to get out there in those days. She had to wash, cook,
and scour for the men at the station."

"Why didn't they come home?" inquired Mrs. Millar rather weakly.

"Come home! They had nothing to come home with, or to. You don't suppose
his brother, the squire, with a wife and family of his own, would have
kept them, though the Beauchamps had received her civilly enough at the
time of the marriage! She had to milk the cows when the cow-man was
otherwise wanted. I do not say that many a better born woman than she
was has not done as much and thought little of it, only it was not in
Aunt Penny's line. I can just remember her when I was a small boy, a
pretty creature who read Italian, sang to her guitar, and made bread
seals for her amusement. She had such a mortal terror where cows were
concerned that she would run like a lapwing when she heard one come
lowing up the lane behind the house. Paton, the man from Sydney who
remembered them