“And how well she has done it too!” muttered he, half aloud; “never touched one of those copper beeches, and given us a peep of the bright river through the meadows.”
As the carriage rolled briskly along, Darby, who trotted alongside, kept up a current narrative of the changes effected during their absence.
“The ould pigeon-house is tuck down, and an iligant new one put up in the island; and the calves' paddock is thrown into the flower-garden, and there's a beautiful flight of steps down to the river, paved with white stones,—sorrow one is n't white as snow.”
“It is a mercy we had not a sign over the door, brother Peter,” whispered Miss Dinah, “or this young lady's zeal would have had it emblazoned like a shield in heraldry.”
“Oh, how lovely, how beautiful, how exquisite!” cried Josephine, as they came suddenly round the angle of a copse and directly in front of the cottage.
Nor was the praise exaggerated. It was all that she had said. Over a light trellis-work, carried along under the thatch, the roses and jessamine blended with the clematis and the passion-flower, forming a deep eave of flowers, drooping in heavy festoons across the spaces between the windows, and meeting the geraniums which grew below. Through the open sashes the rooms might be seen, looking more like beautifnl bowers than the chambers of a dwelling-house. And over all, in sombre grandeur, bent the great ilex-trees, throwing their grand and tranquil shade over the cottage and the little grass-plot and even the river itself, as it swept smoothly by. There was in the stillness of that perfumed air, loaded with the sweet-brier and the rose, a something of calm and tranquillity; while in the isolation of the spot there was a sense of security that seemed to fill op the measure of the young girl's hopes, and made her exclaim with rapture, “Oh, this, indeed, is beautiful!”
“Yes, my darling Fifine!” said the old man, as he pressed her to his heart; “your home, your own home! I told you, my dear child, it was not a great castle, no fine château, like those on the Meuse and the Sambre, but a lowly cottage with a thatched roof and a rustic porch.”
“In all this ardor for decoration and smartness,” broke in Miss Dinah, “it would not surprise me to find that the peacock's tail had been picked out in fresh colors and varnished.”
“Faix! your honor is not far wrong,” interposed Darby, who had an Irish tendency to side with the majority. “She made us curry and wash ould Sheela, the ass, as if she was a race-horse.”
“I hope poor Wowsky escaped,” said Barrington, laughing.