“Tell him—I will go with him—anywhere—at any time—if it will only make him happy.”
The same night, when Nathanael and Anne Valery had left her, Agatha sat thinking, almost in a dream, yet without either sorrow or dread—that all uncertainty was now over—that this day week would be her wedding-day.
CHAPTER VIII.
“I wish, as I stated yesterday, that Miss Bowen's property should be settled entirely upon herself. This is the only course which to my thinking can reconcile a man to the humiliation of receiving a large fortune with his wife.”
“An odd doctrine, truly! Where did you learn it?” laughed Major Harper, who was pacing the Bedford Square drawing-room with quick, uneasy steps; while his brother stood very quiet, only looking from time to time at the closed door. It was the Saturday before the marriage; and Agatha's trustee had come to execute his last guardianship of her and her property. There was lying on a corner-table, pored over by a lawyer-like individual—that formidable instrument, a marriage-settlement.
“Where did I learn it?” returned Mr. Harper, smiling. “Why, where I learned most of my opinions, and everything that is good in me—with Uncle Brian. Poor Uncle Brian!” and the smile faded into grave anxiety.
“Are you really going on that mad expedition?” said the elder brother, with the air of a man who, being perturbed in his own mind, is ready to take a harsh view of everything.
“I do not think it mad—and anything short of madness I ought to undertake, and shall—for him.”
“Ay,” muttered the other, “there it is, Brian always made everybody love him.”