“Too young, old lady, too young. I’ve watched them together hundreds of times. Milly always petted and patronised him, and treated him as if he were a younger brother, of whom she was very fond.”
“Heigho! Oh dear me!” sighed Mrs Luttrell. “But I don’t like him—this Mr Hallam. I never thought when Millicent was a baby that she would ever enter into an engagement like this. Can’t we break it off?”
The doctor shook his head. “I don’t like it, mother. Hallam is the last man I should have chosen for her; but we must make the best of it. He has won her; and she is not a child, but a calm, thoughtful woman.”
“Yes, that’s the worst of it,” sighed Mrs Luttrell; “she is so thoughtful and calm and dignified, that I never can look upon her now as my little girl. I always seem to be talking to a superior woman, whose judgment I must respect. But this is very sad!”
“There, there! we must not treat it like that, old lady. Perhaps we have grown to be old and prejudiced. I own I have.”
“Oh, no, no, my dear!”
“Yes, but I have. As soon as this seemed to be a certainty I began to try and find a hole in the fellow’s coat.”
“In Mr Hallam’s coat, love? Oh, you wouldn’t find that.”
“No,” said the doctor dryly, as he smiled down in the gentle old face, “not one. There, there! you must let it go! Now then, old lady, you must smile and look happy, here’s Milly coming down.”
Mrs Luttrell shook her head, and her wistful look seemed to say that she would never feel happy again; but as Millicent entered, in plain white satin, cut in the high-waisted, tight fashion of the period, and with a necklet of pearls for her only ornament, a look of pride and pleasure came into the mother’s face, and she darted a glance at her husband, which he caught and interpreted, “I will think only of her.”