A civil, mock-modest reply from Richard Bassett.
From this things went on step by step, till at last Compton and Ruperta, at eighteen years of age, were formally betrothed.
Thus the children's love wore out the father's hate.
That love, so troubled at the outset, left, by degrees, the region of romance, and rippled smoothly through green, flowery meadows.
Ruperta showed her lover one more phase of girlhood; she, who had been a precocious and forward child, and then a shy and silent girl, came out now a bright and witty young woman, full of vivacity, modesty, and sensibility. Time cured Compton of his one defect. Ruperta stopped growing at fifteen, but Compton went slowly on; caught her at seventeen, and at nineteen had passed her by a head. He won a scholarship at Oxford, he rowed in college races, and at last in the University race on the Thames.
Ruperta stood, in peerless beauty, dark blue from throat to feet, and saw his boat astern of his rival, saw it come up with, and creep ahead, amid the roars of the multitude. When she saw her lover, with bare corded arms, as brown as a berry, and set teeth, filling his glorious part in that manly struggle within eight yards of her, she confessed he was not a boy now.
But Lady Bassett accepted no such evidence: being pestered to let them marry at twenty years of age, she clogged her consent with one condition—they must live three years at Huntercombe as man and wife.
“No boy of twenty,” said she, “can understand a young woman of that age. I must be in the house to prevent a single misunderstanding between my beloved children.”
The young people, who both adored her, voted the condition reasonable. They were married, and a wing of the spacious building allotted to them.
For their sakes let us hope that their wedded life, now happily commenced, will furnish me no materials for another tale: the happiest lives are uneventful.