“Thank you,” he said. “You do me too great an honor. For, in the first place, I don’t want to marry your daughter; and in the second, the jewels you speak of have already passed out of my reach and out of my knowledge altogether. I wish your daughter a better husband than I should make, the Crown jewels a better keeper than your brother, and yourself a very good evening.”
With a low but a very rapid bow, Rees darted out of the room, only just evading the grasp which the earl, beside himself with rage, would have laid upon his coat-collar. In another instant the front door slammed behind him with a noise that echoed through the house, and two minutes later still he was as much lost to the earl in the pitchy blackness of the fog as if he had left the regions of earth.
CHAPTER XIX.
While Rees Pennant and his two confederates in evil were passing an existence of feverish excitement in London, life at Carstow rippled on with the monotony of a brook in a plain. The only break that ever occurred in the quiet uniformity of Deborah’s daily duties was on the occasion of Godwin’s visits, which had become more frequent of late. He was thinking seriously of “settling down,” so he told Deborah soon after Christmas. He now spent every second Sunday at his mother’s house, and, by Deborah’s imperatively express command, had altogether given up making her his matter-of-fact offers of marriage, and spent much of his time at Carstow, away from the house.
“Settling down?” echoed Deborah, laughing, when he made this announcement. “That seems rather an odd expression to apply to yourself, Godwin. You’ve never been anything else than settled down. Now you might, with some sense, apply that term to Rees.”
“Rees, Rees, Rees,” repeated Godwin, impatiently. “You don’t mean to say that after all this time, you have Rees as much on the brain as ever.”
“ ‘Out of sight’ is not ‘out of mind’ with us women,” answered Deborah, didactically.
“Not when you live in the country, perhaps. If you lived in a big town you’d learn better how to rate people at their proper value.”
“And you would go up, you think, and poor Rees down?”
“Certainly, if you used the educational advantages of town life as you ought. But to come back to the point—when I say I intend to settle down, I mean to marry. I didn’t tell you about it before, because I knew it would distress you.”