“That is all your wits are good for. It is well I met you, or you would have led poor Meta a pretty dance! You will know better than to trust yourself to the mercies of a scholar another time. Let me give you a lift.”
The courteous doctor sprang out to hand Meta in, but something made him suddenly desire Adams to drive on, and then turning round to the two young people, he said, “Oh!”
“Yes,” said Norman, taking her hand, and drawing her towards him.
“What, Meta, my pretty one, is it really so? Is he to be happy after all? Are you to be a Daisy of my own?”
“If you will let me,” murmured Meta, clinging to her kind old friend.
“No flower on earth could come so naturally to us,” said Dr. May. “And, dear child, at last I may venture to tell you that you have a sanction that you will value more than mine. Yes, my dear, on the last day of your dear father’s life, when some foreboding hung upon him, he spoke to me of your prospects, and singled out this very Norman as such as he would prefer.”
Meta’s tears prevented all, save the two little words, “thank you;” but she put out her hand to Norman, as she still rested on the doctor’s arm, more as if he had been her mother than Norman’s father.
“Did he?” from Norman, was equally inexpressive of the almost incredulous gratitude and tenderness of his feeling.
It would not bear talking over at that moment, and Dr. May presently broke the silence in a playful tone. “So, Meta, good men don’t like heiresses?”
“Quite true,” said Meta, “it was very much against me.”