“And you will leave us to-morrow; must it be to-morrow?”
“Ah! Flora, it must; but see, I have your lock of hair—your beautiful, dark hair—to kiss, when I am away from you, and I shall have your letters, dearest,—a letter every day; and oh! more than all, I shall have the hope, the certainty, that when we meet again, you will be mine forever.”
“And I, too, must, by seeing it in your handwriting, learn to reconcile myself to your new name. Ah! I wish you had been still Clarence,—only Clarence. Wealth, rank, power,—what are all these but rivals to poor Flora?”
Lady Flora sighed, and the next moment blushed; and, what with the sigh and the blush, Clarence’s lips wandered from the hands to the cheek, and thence to a mouth on which the west wind seemed to have left the sweets of a thousand summers.
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
A Hounsditch man, one of the devil’s near kinsmen,—a
broker.—Every Man in His Humour.
We have here discovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth.—Much Ado about Nothing.
It was an evening of mingled rain and wind, the hour about nine, when Mr. Morris Brown, under the shelter of that admirable umbrella of sea-green silk, to which we have before had the honour to summon the attention of our readers, was, after a day of business, plodding homeward his weary way. The obscure streets through which his course was bent were at no time very thickly thronged, and at the present hour the inclemency of the night rendered them utterly deserted. It is true that now and then a solitary female, holding up, with one hand, garments already piteously bedraggled, and with the other thrusting her umbrella in the very teeth of the hostile winds, might be seen crossing the intersected streets, and vanishing amid the subterranean recesses of some kitchen area, or tramping onward amidst the mazes of the metropolitan labyrinth, till, like the cuckoo, “heard,” but no longer “seen,” the echo of her retreating pattens made a dying music to the reluctant ear; or indeed, at intervals of unfrequent occurrence, a hackney vehicle jolted, rumbling, bumping over the uneven stones, as if groaning forth its gratitude to the elements for which it was indebted for its fare. Sometimes also a chivalrous gallant of the feline species ventured its delicate paws upon the streaming pavement, and shook, with a small but dismal cry, the raindrops from the pyramidal roofs of its tender ears.
But, save these occasional infringements on its empire, solitude, dark, comfortless, and unrelieved, fell around the creaking footsteps of Mr. Morris Brown. “I wish,” soliloquized the worthy broker, “that I had been able advantageously to dispose of this cursed umbrella of the late Lady Waddilove; it is very little calculated for any but a single lady of slender shape, and though it certainly keeps the rain off my hat, it only sends it with a double dripping upon my shoulders. Pish, deuce take the umbrella! I shall catch my death of cold.”