“Will you do it, then, dear Agatha? Do it for me.”
Agatha was ill at contrivance, but she managed somehow to get away; and before it was dark she and her betrothed were out in the broad terrace.
“Now,” said she, taking his arm kindly, “if anything is amiss, you can tell me all as we walk home. Better walk than ride.”
“No, we must ride; I would not lose a minute,” Nathanael answered, as he hurried her into a conveyance, and gave the order to drive to Bedford Square.
Miss Bowen felt a twinge of repugnance at this control so newly exercised over the liberty of her actions; but her good-heartedness still held out, and she waited patiently for her lover to explain. However, he seemed to forget that any explanation was necessary. He leaned back in the corner quite silent, with his hand over his eyes. Had she loved him, or not known that he was her lover, Agatha would soon have essayed the womanly part of comforter, but now timidity restrained her.
At length timidity was verging into distrust, when he suddenly said, just as they were entering the square:
“I have used the dear right you lately gave me, in taking a strange liberty with you and your house. I have appointed to meet me there to-night one whom I must see, and whom I could not well see in any other way—a lady—a stranger to you. But, stay, she is here!”
And as they stopped at the door, where another carriage had stopped likewise, Nathanael unceremoniously leaped out, and went to this “mysterious stranger.”
“Go in, dear Agatha,” said he returning; “go to your own sitting-room, and I will bring her to you.”
Agatha, half reluctant to be so ordered about, and thoroughly bewildered likewise, mechanically obeyed. Nevertheless, with a sort of pleasure that this humdrum courtship was growing into something interesting at last, she waited for the intruding “lady.”