Then Kitty laid her cheek against her mother’s cheek, and said sadly, “I fear, somehow, that ring will make trouble between Piers and me.”
“Nonsense, dearie! The ring is lost and gone. It can’t make trouble now.”
“Its loss was a bad omen, Mother.”
“There is no omen against true love, Kitty. Love counts every sign a good sign.”
“The Duke was very formal with me at my last visit. The Duchess dislikes me; and Miss Vyner has so many opportunities; it seems nearly impossible that Piers should ever marry me.”
“If Piers loves you, there is no impossibility. Love works miracles. You cannot say ‘impossible’ to Love. Love will find out a way.”
CHAPTER NINTH
A FOOLISH VIRGIN
Parliament was adjourned on the twenty-third of December, and did not re-assemble until the third of February. The interval was one of great public excitement and of great private anxiety. The country had been assured of a Government pledged to Reform; and, in the main, were waiting as patiently as men, hungry and naked, and burning with a sense of injury and injustice, could wait. But no one knew what hour a spark might be cast into such inflammable material,–that would mean Revolution instead of Reform.
Consequently life was depressed, and not disposed to any exhibition of wealth or festivity; the most heartless and reckless feeling that it would not be endured by men and women on the very verge of starvation. The Queen also was unpopular, and the great social leaders were, as a general thing, bitter political partisans; in theatres and ball-rooms and even on the streets, the Whig and Tory ladies, when they met, looked at one another as Guelphs and Ghibellines, instead of christened English gentlewomen.