She tasted
tranquillity. Year after year went by without any news of Reginald, and
the hope grew that he would never cross her threshold again, and
Compton be Sir Charles's heir without any more trouble.
CHAPTER XLI.
OUR story now makes a bold skip. Compton Bassett was fourteen years
old, a youth highly cultivated in mind and trained in body, but not
very tall, and rather effeminate looking, because he was so fair and
his skin so white.
For all that, he was one of the bowlers in the Wolcombe Eleven, whose
cricket-ground was the very meadow in which he had erst gathered
cowslips with Ruperta Bassett; and he had a canoe, which he carried to
adjacent streams, however narrow, and paddled it with singular skill
and vigor. A neighboring miller, suffering under drought, was heard to
say, "There ain't water enough to float a duck; nought can swim but the
dab-chicks and Muster Bassett."
He was also a pedestrian, and got his father to take long walks with
him, and leave the horses to eat their oats in peace.
In these walks young master botanized and geologized his own father,
and Sir Charles gave him a little politics, history, and English
poetry, in return. He had a tutor fresh from Oxford for the classics.
One day, returning with his father from a walk, they met a young lady
walking toward them from the village; she was tall, and a superb
brunette.
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