ruled the children and servants; Aunt Flora, watchful and jealous and sharp-tongued; Uncle Will, idle and laughing; Aunt Lily, small and delicate, reading Tennyson and singing “In Old Madrid” at the square piano; remembered his own splendid, rollicking baby half-brother Tom, and remembered above all Roger himself, still handsome, superb, riding his horses along the cliffs[16] all about, driving splendid bays in an open barouche, carrying off the boys’ mother to hear Irving’s “Thomas à Becket” or Rostand’s “L’Aiglon” in Boston.

[16]

A veritable horde of servants kept this big household comfortable—butlers, gardeners, a coachman, a stable boy, fat cooks in the kitchen, whispering maids in the upper halls, and almost always a comfortable middle-aged housekeeping person who conferred constantly with old “Aunt John” and haggled with fruit peddlers at the gate in the sandy back lane.

This staff of domestics was lessened now, although there were still a butler and half-a-dozen underlings. But there had been other changes more important at Wastewater.

First, when David was six and little Tom Fleming five years old, their mother had died. Afterward, the boys had been packed off to boarding school and had been there when they heard of another death at home, this time of old “Aunt John.”

But Flora and Lily and Will continued to live there with Roger, and it was only a few months after their mother’s death that Flora, between a frown and a smile, had told them that she was shortly to take that mother’s place: she and Roger were to be married as soon as his year of mourning was over.

This had not deeply impressed the little boys; they cared little what their elders did, and had it not been that a new figure had immediately come upon the scene, David thought, long afterward, that he might easily have believed himself to have dreamed Flora’s announcement.

But a new figure did come, among the many friends[17] and relatives who were always drifting through Wastewater, the figure of a certain handsome, sensible blonde Mrs. Kent, from Montreal, merely visiting Roger on her way back home, and with her, her little daughter Cecily, fresh from a Baltimore school. Cecily had been seventeen then, dark, fragile, flower-like. She was merely a child, going home to her father and little brother and stopping to visit a friend of Mamma’s on the way.

[17]

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