Up at Heron's Carew Paul is growing into a tall manly fellow, whom his father is already talking of sending to school, and there is another baby boy, a year old in the nursery, and a little girl a couple of years older, who is her mother's very image, and the joy of her father's heart.
Unlike the Crassters, Sir Anthony and Lady Carew spend most of their time in the country. Sir Anthony, like most men, is happiest there, occupied with his hunting, and his shooting and looking after his property, while the very mention of London to Lady Carew always seems to bring back the memory of that bygone tragedy that once threatened to wreck their lives.
Echoes from the past reach them sometimes when Mrs. Rankin and her daughter pay them a visit, or when a keen looking man with a stubby sandy beard, who is a great friend of Paul's, comes to spend a brief holiday at the Carew Arms. Occasionally, too, the society papers chronicle the doings of a certain Princess Zeuridoff who was, before her second marriage, Lady Palmer.
The Princess has made several tentative efforts of late to renew her friendship with the Carews, and professes herself grieved that her overtures have met with no response. She shrugs her shoulders sometimes, and asks, "What can you expect from the mad Carews?"
Sir Anthony and Lady Carew, however, reck little of her displeasure. Their mutual love, strengthened and purified by the trials they have undergone, their affection for their children, their care for their dependents and their poorer neighbours round their beautiful things make up the happiness of their lives, and they have little time to spare for outside interests.
Judith is adored by the poor folk in all the country-side. Sir Anthony is her willing helper in all her schemes for the good of others, and people, in general, have almost forgotten, seeing him so transformed by his wife's gentle influence, that he was ever spoken of as one of the mad Carews of Heron's Carew.
The House in Charlton Crescent
Chapter I
Lady Anne Daventry was not a pleasant old lady. Her nearest and dearest found her difficult to get on with, her servants called her "cantankerous," and her contemporaries—those who remembered her in her far-off beautiful youth—said she had a good heart.
She was not so very old really, not as people count age nowadays. More than a whole year lay between her and that seventieth birthday that makes such a very definite landmark in most people's lives. Trouble and ill-health had combined to make her look far older than her actual years. No one would have thought her younger than her only remaining brother—The Rev. and Hon. Augustus Fyvert—the rector of North Coton. Yet, in reality, Lady Anne had been a child in the nursery when he was a big boy going to Eton.
Life had not been kind to Lady Anne. The parents, whose petted darling she had been, had both died without seeing their youngest and most dearly-loved child grow up, and the man to whom she had been engaged in her youth, and whom she had passionately loved, had been false to her. Her subsequent marriage with Squire Daventry, of Daventry Keep, had been in the nature of a compromise, and her life with him had not been an easy one. One consolation she had had—the two bonny boys, who grew up to handsome manhood within the walls of Daventry Keep. Then, following swiftly on the old Squire's death, had come the great war; Christopher Daventry and his brother Frank had both died gloriously, fighting for England and freedom, and Lady Anne was left desolate.
The effect upon her of the double blow was devastating. For a time they feared for Lady Anne's life and reason, but she was not made of the stuff that goes under. Her vigorous vitality reasserted itself, and very soon Lady Anne came out into the world once more.
But she was never quite the same; grief seemed to have hardened, not softened, her whole nature. She who had been gracious and charming became snappy and irritable, and finally, when the rheumatism, from which she had suffered for years, became chronic and brought about a permanent stiffness of the limbs, Lady Anne, while saying little of her sufferings, was a distinctly cross and unpleasant old lady.
In her boys' time she had lived principally at Daventry Keep, which, by the terms of the old Squire's will, remained hers for life, but after the death