Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

28 страница из 81

“Did I like him? He is not easy to approach, and it was only when I told him that, though living at Oaklands, I go inland every autumn for the hunting, and know Gilead well, also his Cousin Keith and West farm, where I had once seen his daughter Brooke, that his eye brightened and he showed any interest, while at the same moment some one whom he had evidently been watching broke away from a distant group, and, your cousin darting off to join him, our talk ceased.”

“If Adam cares for anything but money-making, which I’ve sometimes doubted, it is for Brooke,” said Miss Keith, quite at her ease again, the coffee that she was pouring being fully up to its reputation. “In fact, he deeded this farm to her on her twenty-first birthday, all on the strength of her girlish whim and talk long ago about the River Kingdom. This also makes me feel uncertain about my stay here. What if Brooke should marry and he should wish her to sell the place? Not that Adam has ever said a word to me about the transfer, and he pays the taxes and what not just the same, but Job Farrish was looking up his boundaries last spring and saw the deed recorded in the Town House. In fact, Adam himself never writes nowadays, his secretary does it all; and even Brooke has only written once this year, and that was when I said the gutter having leaked, the north room needed new paper, and she sent it—pretty it is, too, wild roses running through a rustic lattice—she’s always had an open eye for colour.”