“Ah,” laughed Pontycroft, “you shall see! The pendulum is bound to narrow its oscillations! We'll earn a well-needed rest,—here.”
“Oh me!” sighed Ruth, “ah me!” cried Ruth. “In that event how charmed our ancestors will be. But, I forgot! You haven't heard the story.” Ruth told it gaily and waited, curious to see what Harry Pontycroft would say.
“Dear young one, these old four-posters,” he began—“are the most dangerous things to sleep in,” and Ruth was seized with laughter.
“But I'll never sell them to the nearest dealer in old bric-a-brac. Rather,” she concluded, “we'll do as you advised, we'll take the greatest care not to offend our forbears. But——-” her forefinger went up impressively, “but a destiny was in preparation for us—I felt it, Harry, on the very day after I reached here. Harry, I felt, I knew, Destiny had something up her sleeve. The day I went for a walk alone,” said Ruth, with a serious air. “It is a delicious destiny... to be married in the little Parish church by that Saint of a Priest and to live here, 'forever afterwards'!” (with a malicious nod,) “with a break now and then to Europe.”
“Moreover and because journeys end in lovers' meeting, we'll probably have a June wedding,” Pontycroft unexpectedly suggested, wise in his generation.
“A June wedding!... I've built better than I knew,” exclaimed Ruth. “I've asked a house party of friends, friends of yours, Lucilla's and mine, to come here in June. Let them haste to the wedding—I'll have Jackie Enderfield for page and he shall carry my train.”
“Another admirer,” Ponty said resigned.
“The merest bit of a boy of twelve. Without him, without my uncle, these wits like as not had perished utterly. Jack when he's a man intends to marry a woman with a low voice and a red glint in her hair. He will turn Catholic with my consent and go abroad and write. He doesn't believe either in Divorce—in other words, you perceive he is an intellectual. But,” she said, rising, “we've forgotten—oh, we've forgotten to send that message by Jobias to poor King Bertram! We shall have to take it ourselves.”
Henry Pontycroft and Ruth descended the hill along the violet-sprinkled road.
“Ruth,” he urged, as they went their way, “for conscience sake, consider,—consider, little Ruth,” he said, “ah, consider.... It is not yet too late, infant, and I had dreamed for Ruth Adgate of a Royal End!”