"Well, then, your congratulations, please. I asked her to marry me as we crossed Regent Circus, Oxford Street, on the way home; a hansom came by and scattered and splashed us. Then we came together again, and just opposite Peter Robinson's, she asked me if my mind was quite made up—if I was sure I wouldn't ever change. I swore by the eternal gods, and she said she would be my wife; so there we are, an engaged couple."
I must ask the reader to believe that I was equal to the occasion, and said what I ought to have said.
Mrs. Gibson was happy at last; she was satisfied that Barty was a "gentleman," in spite of the kink in his birth; and as for his prospects, money was a thing that never entered Mrs. Gibson's head, and she loved Barty as a son—was a little bit in love with him herself, I believe; she was not yet forty, and as pretty as she could be.
Besides, a week after, who should call upon her over the shop—there was a private entrance of course—but the Right Honorable Lady Caroline Grey and her niece, Miss Daphne Rohan, granddaughter of the late and niece of the present Marquis of Whitby!
And Mrs. Gibson felt as much at home with them in five minutes as if she'd known them all her life.
Leah was summoned from below, and kissed and congratulated by the two aristocratic relatives of Barty's, and relieved of her shyness in a very short time indeed.
As a matter of fact, Lady Caroline, who knew her nephew well, and thoroughly understood his position, was really well pleased; she had never forgotten her impression of Leah when she met her in the park with Ida and me a year back, and we all walked by the Serpentine together—a certain kind of beauty seems to break down all barriers of rank; and she knew Leah's character both from Barty and me, and from her own native shrewdness of observation. She had been delighted to hear from Barty of Leah's resolute participation in her father's troubles, and in his attempt—so successful through her—to rehabilitate his business. To her old-fashioned aristocratic way of looking at things, there was little to choose between a respectable West End shopkeeper and a medical practitioner or dentist or solicitor or architect—or even an artist, like Barty himself. Once outside the Church, the Army and Navy, or a Government office, what on earth did it matter who or what one was, or wasn't? The only thing she couldn't stand was that
