"Oh! I beg your pardon, Charlotte; I had forgotten you and I were to spend the day with mother; I will be ready in a few minutes. I must just wait till Susan can take baby." Susan appeared at this moment, and Joyce went quickly into the hall.
Poor Charlotte's visions and dreams had never come to be anything but dreams. She was older than Joyce, and still had never found the language of the eyes come to a good honest declaration of love, still less to an offer of marriage. She was just now on a visit to her cousin, Miss Falconer being very ready to spare her, hoping that in Clifton or Bristol she might find a cure for her low spirits, and generally dejected air, which her aunt did not like to have remarked upon by the gossips of Wells, and which had certainly very much increased of late.
Joyce ran upstairs to prepare for her visit, and on the first floor found Mrs. Arundel.
"Mr. Bengough has been here, Joyce, with great news; the Bill was carried with a large majority in the Commons, and now there is only the Lords, and surely they will not turn it out."
Falcon, who had rushed up to the nursery to find his reins and whip, that he might make a pair of ponies of his little sisters, stopped as he heard his grandmother say:
"It is great news, and a great victory."
"What battle is it? Tell me, mother, who has been fighting?"
"It was not a battle with swords or guns, Falcon; but when you are a man you may remember that you heard, when you were a little boy, that on the nineteenth of September, eighteen hundred and thirty-one, the great Reform Bill was carried by a number of votes."
"Then will all those angry people we saw when we came home from Fair Acres be happy and good now. Susan says they shouted 'Reform, Reform,' because they wanted bread; but I don't know what it means," said Falcon, thoughtfully. "If it's a good thing, it ought to make people better, oughn't it, Grannie?"