considering. After a pause she added slowly: "You others are all
under papa's thumb, and you make me a coward. But I will promise you
this"--here her words began to drag--"and to strengthen me no less
than to ease your fears, I promise it, mother. If the worst come to
the worst, it shall not be at Kelstein that I choose it, but here
among you all. I think you will gain little by sending me to
Kelstein, mother: but you need not be afraid for me there."

"You speak in enigmas."

"And my tone, you would say, is something too theatrical for your
taste? Well, well, dear mother, 'tis the privilege of a house with a
doom upon it to talk tragedy: for, you know, Molly declares we have a
doom upon us, though we cannot agree what 'tis. I uphold it to be
debt, or papa's tantrums, or perhaps Old Jeffrey [apparently the
Wesley family ghost] but she will have it to be something deeper, and
that one day we shall awake and see that it includes all three."

"It appears to be my doom," said Mrs. Wesley, her face relaxing, "to
listen to a deal of nonsense from my daughters."

"And who's to blame, dear? You chose to marry at twenty, and here
you have a daughter unmarried at seven and twenty. Now I respect and
love you, as you well know: but every now and then reason steps in
and proves to me that I am seven years your senior--which is absurd,
and the absurder for the grave wise face you put upon it. So come
along, sweet-and-twenty, and help me pack my buskins." Hetty led the
way upstairs humming an air which (though her mother did not
recognise it) was Purcell's setting of a song in _Twelfth Night_: