“Not a word of this; I dare say there is nothing in it. But I am not much in favour of your new lights.”
“Nor I neither. What better than the good old Church of England?”
“Madam, your sentiments do you honour; you’ll be sure not to say anything of our little mystery.”
“Not a syllable.”
Two days after this three old maids made an excursion to the village of Covedale, and lo! the cottage in question was shut up—the woman and the child were gone. The people in the village knew nothing about them—had seen nothing particular in the woman or child—had always supposed them mother and daughter; and the gentleman identified by the clerical inquisitor with the banker had never but once been observed in the place.
“The vile old parson,” said the eldest of the old maids, “to take away so good a man’s character!—and the fly will cost one pound two, with the baiting!”
CHAPTER VI.
“In this disposition was I, when looking out of my window one
day to take the air, I perceived a kind of peasant who looked
at me very attentively.”—GIL BLAS.
A SUMMER’S evening in a retired country town has something melancholy in it. You have the streets of a metropolis without their animated bustle—you have the stillness of the country without its birds and flowers. The reader will please to bring before him a quiet street in the quiet country town of C———, in a quiet evening in quiet June; the picture is not mirthful—two young dogs are playing in the street, one old dog is watching by a newly-painted door. A few ladies of middle age move noiselessly along the pavement, returning home to tea: they wear white muslin dresses, green spencers a little faded, straw poke bonnets with green or coffee-coloured gauze veils. By twos and threes they have disappeared within the thresholds of small neat houses, with little railings, inclosing little green plots. Threshold, house, railing, and plot, each as like to the other as are those small commodities called “nest-tables,” which, “even as a broken mirror multiplies,” summon to the bewildered eye countless iterations of one four-legged individual. Paradise Place was a set of nest houses.