"Cheering up!" cried May. "Oh! but I remember that Mrs. Hadlow said you always liked to be pitied for having your own way. You must require a great deal of consolation, truly, for the prospect of travelling in that delightful country!"
Owen nodded, and carefully fitted one pleat of his hat-brim into another, as he answered, "I dare say my appetite for consolation is bigger than you imagine."
"I think it is Mr. Bragg who needs cheering up. Poor man, he little knows what a peremptory, protestant, and positive secretary he will have!" retorted May, with a half shy, half saucy, wholly mischievous, glance.
"Not at all! Now, that is just the kind of mistake which Aunt Jane so often makes. But if I serve, I mean to serve honestly, and to be thoroughly obedient; I have told Mr. Bragg so." And Owen proceeded to justify himself, and to develop his views as to the duties of a secretary, with superfluous energy and earnestness.
The old woman sat watching them, and, as she looked, she was amazed at her own previous blindness. How could she—how could any one—have seen them together without perceiving that they were falling over head and ears in love with each other? These two young creatures seemed, in her old eyes, like a couple of children playing in a pleasure-boat. But she knew that the river was running towards the sea—widening and deepening with an irrevocable current. There was room for anxiety about the future, no doubt. Yet a sense of relief in her mind—as if she had escaped out of some oppressive atmosphere—revealed more and more distinctly how repugnant the idea of May's marrying Mr. Bragg had really been to her.
"Sarah Dobbs," said she to herself severely, "you're a worldly, false old woman! You're a nice one to find fault with that poor creature Pauline! What were you doing, pray, but sacrificing your conscience to the mammon of unrighteousness? The Lord be praised, the dear child is better, and purer, and honester than either of us old harridans!"
Then she broke into the conversation between May and Owen, which by this time had sunk into a low murmur, and asked abruptly whether the engagement with Mr. Bragg was to lead to any further employment.
Owen repeated what Mr. Bragg had said to him, as nearly as he could remember it; and Mrs. Dobbs thought it hopeful.
"Joshua Bragg is an honest man—a man to be relied on: one of the few who generally means what he says, all that he says, and nothing but what he says," said she, nodding thoughtfully.
May was glad to find granny doing justice to Mr. Bragg; and remarked to herself that, if it were possible to conceive granny's ever being capricious, she would have called her capricious to-day in her varying tone about that worthy man.