Mrs Norberry angrily shook them off, with a peevish—'Get along, girls.' The doctor cordially kissed, and bade God bless them; while the door closed and left the loving couple alone.
What passed, it were tedious to repeat: suffice that after a long altercation, continued even after they were retired to rest, the doctor found his wife, on this subject, incapable of listening to reason, and that, as a finishing stroke, she exclaimed, 'It does not signify talking, Dr Norberry, while I have my senses, and can see into a mill-stone a little, the hussey shall never come near us.'
The doctor sighed deeply; turned himself round, not to sleep but to think, and rose the next morning to go in search of Mrs Mowbray, dreading the interview which he was afterwards to have with Adeline; for he did not expect to succeed in his application to her mother, and he could not now soften his intelligence with a 'but,' as he intended. 'True,' he meant to have said to her, 'your mother will not receive you; but if you ever want a home or a place of retirement, I have a cottage, and so forth.'
'Pshaw!' cried the doctor to himself, as these thoughts came across him on the road, and made him hastily let down the front window of the post-chaise for air.
'Did your honour speak?' cries the post-boy.
'Not I. But can't you drive faster and be hanged to you?'
The boy whipped his horses.—The doctor then found that it was up hill—down went the glass again:—'Hold, you brute, why do you not see it is up hill?' For find fault he must; and with his wife he could not, or dared not, even in fancy.
'Dear me! Why, your honour bade me put it on.'
'Devilishly obedient,' muttered the doctor: 'I wish every one was like you in that respect.'—And in a state of mind not the pleasantest possible the doctor drove into town, and to the hotel where Mrs Mowbray was to be found.
Dr Norberry was certainly now not in a humour to sooth any woman whom he thought in the wrong, except his wife; and, whether from carelessness or design, he did not, unfortunately for Adeline, manage the self-love of her unhappy mother.