CHAPTER XXXI.—SPIDERS AND FLIES.
“M y dear Kate, I think your cousin, Mrs. Coverdale, has just driven up; and yet I don’t know. Is it likely, or, as I may say, probable, that she should arrive in a brougham?”
“With a high-stepping horse, and a coronet on the panels?—scarcely, I should imagine.”
The speakers were Mr. Crane, who had grown rather less like a scaffold-pole since we last were favoured with his society, and Horace D’Almayne, who appeared quite himself and quite at home. Attracted by their remarks, Kate joined her husband at the window.
“It can’t be them,” she said, “there is no luggage;” but, as if to contradict her remark, at the moment she ceased to speak a cab dashed into Park Lane with a fair amount of imperials, cap-cases, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, and other female travelling miscellania, and drew up behind the brougham. As it stopped, a tall, handsome young man sprang out, and opening the door of the brougham, offered his arm to Alice, and conducted her up the steps most carefully.
“Why, that surely cannot be Mr. Coverdale; or, at least, if I may be permitted to say so, he has become singularly thin and—and youthful-looking, if it is,” bleated Mr. Crane.
“No, that is not Harry Coverdale,” returned Kate, wonderingly, “nor do I see anything of him either!”
“If Mrs. Coverdale has lost her husband, really she has found a most attractive substitute—a—it almost seems one of the cases in which such a loss might be considered a gain,” lisped D’Almayne, in so low a tone that Mr. Crane, who was nearly as slow of hearing as he was of understanding, did not catch the remark. “Really quite a touching farewell,” he continued, as Alice, ere she entered the house, shook hands most cordially with her young cavalier; “and the gallant, gay Lothario jumps into the brougham (which, coronet, high-stepping horse, and all, evidently calls him master) and is lost to our admiring gaze.”