"To-night!—this minute!—wait till I put on my bonnet!" exclaimed Agnes, in accents of the liveliest glee. "I am quite impatient to set about forgetting Edinburgh!"
"Well done, Lady Towercliffe! Harrowgate was a capital hit!" cried Sir Patrick, laughing satirically. "Before taking a voyage to India, there is no place like it for young ladies! Why, Agnes, it is a perfect emporium of beaux! You will live there at the rate of twenty new victims a-day! A down-pour of marriages takes place at the end of every season. Several jewellers have made large fortunes at Harrowgate, merely by providing wedding rings! and a confectioner is kept at each hotel, with nothing else to do but to make marriage cakes! Sir Arthur must take a dozen lessons in match-making, from some of the manœuvring mammas and aunts."
"An unmanœuvring uncle is all we shall require," answered Agnes, looking daggers at Sir Patrick, in all the dignity of having been extremely ill-treated. "In my humble opinion——"
"Humble, Agnes!" interrupted Sir Patrick. "Did I hear aright? Where did you ever learn the meaning of that word?"
"As for manœuvring or match-making, I leave all that sort of thing to such persons as Lady Towercliffe," observed Sir Arthur. "She and other old ladies have such an intense curiosity about weddings, that I do think, even when laid in their graves, they would like to be told who are going to be married. In such affairs I would be out of my element, like a bear in a boat, not knowing how to proceed,—but at my age——"
"Your age, uncle Arthur! You are no age at all," interrupted Agnes, in high good humor. "You are not a day older since we were first acquainted! As Harrowgate is the greatest marriage manufactory in Britain, I should not wonder if you were to pick up a wife there yourself! Indeed, no single man ever escapes, and I shall make it my business to get you off!"
"By all means!" replied the Admiral, entering good-humoredly into the jest. "I have no doubt some young lady will fall desperately and hopelessly in love with me! Are those new spectacles becomingly put on? My eyes are so fine, they must be kept under glass! My hair has had rather too much of the bleaching liquid lately, but do you recommend a wig, Agnes, or the vegetable dye?"
"I would not alter a hair of your head, uncle Arthur," said Marion, smiling. "And I am sure you will have more admirers at Harrowgate than any of us. I should like to know," added she, after the Admiral had departed, "out of the prodigious incomes enjoyed by thousands of persons in Britain, how much is spent during the year in really generous actions,—in actions of such disinterested liberality as our dear kind uncle's, when putting himself to all this expense and inconvenience for our sakes,—for ours, who never can make him the smallest return."
"To say the truth," replied Agnes, laughing, "I merely go to Harrowgate for Sir Arthur's good. It will renew his youth to be forced into balls, beguiled into pic-nics, and enlisted into dinner parties. A diet of ice and lemonade is excellent for old people."
"You are lucky girls!" exclaimed Sir Patrick. "A month at Harrowgate! why! you might be married five times over in that time! It is not the most impossible thing in the world that I may come there myself, to meet De Crespigny! The matrimonial horizon looked rather dark and unpromising in this quarter, Agnes; but your extraordinary merit is quite unknown as yet in the English hemisphere. The world shall see you, and you shall see the world now, under Sir Arthur's auspices. Good worthy old soul! his very walking-stick is respectable!"