After a moment’s silence, she added—
“I was so much interested when I heard you were going to be married, and hoped, nay prayed, that you might be as happy as I would—would always have you. I am grieved to think that Mrs. Coverdale should not fully appreciate the prize she has drawn in that most uncertain of all lotteries, marriage; but I feel sure she will learn to understand you better, and all will come right: you are evidently much attached to her, and that being the case, she must love you.” Then in a lower tone she added—“You are not one likely to love in vain.”
What reply, if any, Harry would have made to this speech, will never be known, as at that minute they entered the line of carriages setting down at the gate of the Chiswick Gardens, and Coverdale had enough to occupy him in preventing his excitable horses from committing a breach of the peace. Whether or no the phaeton groom was an observant man we cannot say, but if he felt the degree of amiable interest usually displayed by domestic servants in the affairs of their superiors, he must have been struck when mentally contrasting Mr. Coverdale’s manner of handing Miss Crofton into and out of that open carriage by an immense accession of cordiality, for which he was probably more puzzled to account than we trust the reader finds himself.
CHAPTER XXXV.—FLOWERS AND THORNS.
“W e have somehow contrived to lose sight of the barouche,” exclaimed Coverdale, after looking up and down the line of carriages in vain; “I expect they must have escaped us when that white-nosed horse shyed at Punch; I fancied I knew which way they had turned, but I must have gone down a wrong street—poor old Crane will be in fits—I wonder what we had better do?”
“What I should suggest is to walk slowly backwards and forwards inside the gate, and watch for their arrival,” returned Arabella, wishing in her secret soul that one of the barouche-horses might have fallen dead lame, or that any other catastrophe, not involving injury to life or limb, might have befallen the rest of the party.
After parading up and down with most laudable perseverance for nearly half an hour, during which time the crowd grew thicker and thicker, and everybody arrived except the party they were in search of, Harry suddenly exclaimed,—
“You’ll be tired to death with all this pushing and squeezing; they must have come some shorter way, and got here before us; let us go on to the conservatory, we shall meet them there, I dare say.”