Agatha submitted—with a good grace, of course; though she thought the rule absolute was painfully prevalent in the Harper family. But as half-an-hour went by, and the morning air, so fresh and cool, tempted her sorely, she tried to set aside this formal domestic regulation.
Mary looked quite frightened at her overt rebellion.—“My dear Mrs. Harper—indeed we never do it. Do we, Nathanael?” said she, appealingly.
He listened to the discussion a moment.—“My dear wife, since my father would not like it, you will not go, I know.”
The tone was gentle, but Agatha would as soon have thought of overleaping a stone wall as of opposing a desire thus expressed. She sat quietly down again—or would have done so, but that she saw Eulalie smile meaningly at her sister. Intercepting the young wife, the smile changed into affected condolence.
“Nathanael will have his way, you see. If you only knew what he was as a little boy,” and the Beauty shrugged her shoulders pathetically. “Really, as Harrie says, most men would never get wives at all, did their lady loves know them only half as well as their sisters do.”
“Nay,” said the good-natured Mary, “but Harrie also says that men, like wine, improve with age, especially if they are kept cool and not too much shaken up. She has no doubt that even her Duke was a very disagreeable boy. So, Mrs. Harper, let me assure you——”—
“There is no need; I am quite satisfied,” said Mrs. Harper, with no small dignity; and at this momentous crisis her father-in-law entered the room.
He entered dressed for riding—looking somewhat younger than the night before, more cheerful and pleasant too, but not a whit less stately. He saluted Agatha first, and then his daughters, with a gracious solemnity, patting their cheeks all round, something after the fashion of a good-humoured Eastern bashaw. The old gentleman evidently took a secret pride in his womenkind. Then he shook hands with “my son Nathanael,” and threw abroad generally a few ordinary remarks, to which his two daughters listened with great reverence. But in all he did or said was the same benignant hauteur; he seemed frozen up within a conglomerate of reserve and formal courtesy; he walked, talked, looked perpetually as Nathanael Harper, Esquire, of Kingcombe Holm, who never allowed either his mind or his body to appear en déshabille. Agatha wondered how he could ever have been a baby squalling, a boy playing, or a young man wooing; nay, more (the thought irresistibly presented itself as she noticed the extreme feebleness which his dignity but half disguised), how he would ever stoop to the last levelling of all humanity—the grave-clothes and the tomb.
“Any letters, my dear children? Any news to tell me before I ride to Kingcombe?” said he, looking round the circle with a patronising interest, which Agatha would scarcely have believed real, but for the kindly expression of the old man's eye.
“There were plenty of letters for Elizabeth, as usual; one for Eulalie “—here Eulalie looked affectedly conscious—“no others, I think.”