She answered, thoughtfully, “I believe in my husband too, otherwise I would not have married him. Therefore, since our two wills seem to clash, and he is the older and the wiser—let him decide as he thinks best—I will try to 'have faith in him.'”
Nathanael grasped her hand, but did not speak—it seemed impossible to him. Soon after, they all rose and turned homeward, leaving the breezy terrace and the bright sunshiny sea. None turned to look back at either, excepting only—for one lingering, parting glance—Anne Valery.
CHAPTER XIV.
The same afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Harper and Miss Valery drove to Kingcombe, to see if in that quaint little town there was a house suitable for the young couple. They had not said a word to either of the Miss Harpers concerning this sudden arrangement, agreeing that the father of the household ought to be shown the respect of receiving the first information.
“And then,” said Nathanael, “I trust mainly to Anne Valery to overcome his scruples. Anne can do anything she likes with my father. Don't you remember,” he continued, leaning over to the front seat where the two ladies were, and looking quite cheerful, as though a great load had been taken off his mind—“don't you remember—I do, though I was such a little boy—how there was one day a grand family tumult because Frederick wanted his commission, and my father refused it—how you walked up and down the garden, first with one and then with the other, persuading everybody to be friends, while Uncle Brian and I”—
“There, that will do,” said Miss Valery. “Never mind old times, but let us look forward to the future. Here we are at Kingcombe. Agatha, how do you like the place?”
And Agatha, on this glowing autumn afternoon, eagerly examined her future home.
It was a rather noteworthy country town; small, clean, with an air of sober preservation, reminding one of a well-kept, dignified, healthy old age. It wore its antiquity with a sort of pride, as if its quaint streets, intersecting one another in cruciform shape, still kept the impress of mediaeval feet, baron's or priest's, in the days when Kingcombe had sixteen churches and a castle to boot—as if the Roman walls which enclosed it lay solemnly conscious that, at night, ghosts of old Latin warriors glided over the smooth turf of those great earthen mounds where the town's-children played. Even the very river, which came up to the town narrow and slow, with perhaps one sailing-barge on it visible far across the flat country, and looking like a boat taking an insane pedestrian excursion over the meadows—even the river seemed to run silently, as if remembering the time when it had floated up Danish ships with their fierce barbarian freight, and landed them just under that red sand-cliff, where the lazy cows now stood, and the innocent blackberry-bushes grew.
It was a curious place Kingcombe, or so Agatha thought.