The two young things bent their heads, and he blessed them with his blessing of eighty years. Lord Rotherwood’s eyes were full of tears, as he said in a choked voice—
“Thank you, sir,” while Franceska murmured to Mysie—
“I do like that he should have been the first to call me ‘my lady.’”
The luncheon included only the two families, and the actual assistants at the wedding, and it was really very merry. Lady Rotherwood did inspire a little awe, but then Alda, sitting near, knew exactly how to talk to her, and Alda, who, like Geraldine, had dressed herself in soft greys and whites, with her delicate cheeks flushed with pleasure and triumph, looked as beautiful as ever, and far outshone her twin, whose complexion and figure both had become those of the portly housewife.
Meta, otherwise Mrs. Norman May, had eyes as bright and lively as ever, though face and form had both grown smaller, and she was more like a fairy godmother than the Titania she had been in times of old. She had got into the middle of all the varieties of children, dragged thither by Gertrude’s Pearl and Audrey, and was making them happy.
Ethel and Geraldine never could come to the end of what they had to say to one another, except that Ethel could but be delighted to make her friend know the brother of her early youth; and show her the grave, earnest-looking man who had suffered so much, and whose hair was as white as the doctor’s, his face showing the sunburn of the tropics; and the crow’s-feet round his eyes, the sailor’s habit of searching gaze. He did not speak much, but watched the merry young groups as if they were a sort of comedy in his eyes.
They were very merry, especially when the doctor had proposed the health of the bride, and her brother, Sir Adrian, was called on to return thanks for her.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” he said, “no, I mean ladies and gentlemen, I am very much obliged to you all for the honour you have done my sister. I can tell Lord Ivinghoe she is a very good girl, and very nice, and all that, when she is not cocky, and doesn’t try to keep one in order.”
The speech was drowned in laughter, and calls to Ivinghoe to mind what he was about, and beware of the “new woman.”
So the young couple were seen off to spend their honeymoon in Scotland, and the rest of the party could pair off to enjoy their respective friends, except that Mary and Sophy had to exhibit the wedding presents to all and sundry of the visitors of all degrees who began to flock in.