"Come along, Olly, we must be off. It's frightfully late."
She began to roll up her music, and Wick answered Griselda's question.
"I'm perfectly sure," he said gravely, "that I've found my girl—what poets call my mate. And I shall love her till I die."
"I hope you will, I'm sure," put in Mrs. Walbridge warmly, to cover Grisel's unkind air of distance. And when she had let the Wicks out of the door with Paul, she hurried upstairs to reprove her daughter for her unsympathetic manner, but Griselda had gone to bed.
[CHAPTER XX]
Early the next morning old Mrs. Wick, who also had been spending the night in town with the friends where her children were staying, was gratified, while she was still in bed, by a visit from her son, who burst into the room apparently more than delighted with himself and the way his particular world was wagging.
"A most beautiful party, mother," he exclaimed, wrapping himself up in her eiderdown, for his pyjamas were old, and worn, and chilly. "And the wretch looked lovelier than ever."
"I hope you aren't going to backslide, Oliver," she said severely, taking her spectacles out of their old case and putting them on so that she might look at him over their tops.