Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/347

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CONDUCTED BY ""
 * No. 15..
 * SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 1869.
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" will be glad to see you, miss, in the library, if you please."

"Very good, Wilson. Is Mr. Creswell alone?"

"Mr. Radford, the agent from Brocksopp, have been with him for the last half hour, miss: but he's on the point to go. I saw him getting on his gloves as I left the room."

"Very good; tell Mr. Creswell I will be with him at once."

The servant retired, closing the door behind her, and Marian was left alone with her mother. They were in what they had become accustomed to call "their own" sitting-room, with its bright chintz furniture and tasteful appointments, as Marian had described them in her letter to Walter. It was tolerably early morning, just after ten o'clock, and the sun lit up the garden and the grass plot, from which the slight frost had not yet disappeared, though the snowdrops and the crocuses were already showing their heads in the flower borders, while the ditch-banks of the neighbourhood were thick with promised crops of violets and primroses. Mrs. Ashurst, whose infirmities seemed greatly to have increased within the past six months, was sitting by the fire with her face turned towards the window, enjoying the brightness of the morning; but her back was turned to the door, and she had not caught the servant's message.

"What was that Martha said, my dear?" she asked. "My hearing's getting worse, I think. I miss almost everything that's said now."

"You had your back towards her, dear mother; and you were too pleasantly occupied looking at the bright weather outside, and thinking that we should soon be able to get you out for a turn up and down the long walk, in the sun. Martha came to say that Mr. Creswell wanted to see me in the library."

"Again, Marian? Why you were with him for hours—when was it—the day before yesterday."

"Yes, mother; you're quite right; I was there, helping him with his accounts. But there was some information which had to be supplied, before we could finish them. I suppose he has obtained that now, and we can go on with our work."

"You're a clever child, my dear," said the old lady, fondly stroking her daughter's shining hair.

"There's more use than cleverness in what I'm doing for Mr. Creswell, darling mother. Don't you remember how I used to make out the boarders' bills for poor papa, and the 'general running account' to be submitted half yearly to the governors? These are larger and more intricate matters, of course, dealing as they do with the amount and sources of Mr. Creswell's income; but I think I have mastered the method of dealing with them, and Mr. Creswell, I imagine, thinks so too."

"It must be a very large income, my dear, to keep up all this place, and"

"Large! You have no conception of it, mother. I had no conception of it, nor of how it came in, and grew, and is for ever growing, until it was before me in black and white. Original funds, speculations, mortgages, investments in this and that, in ships and wharves and breweries, in foreign railroads andAh! good heavens, it's enough to turn one's brain to think of!"