“Ah,” said Acton, returning her glance, “that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions,” he added. “We are to have another marriage.”
But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. “My word was never doubted before,” she said.
“We are to have another marriage,” Acton repeated, smiling.
Then she appeared to understand. “Another marriage?” And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. “It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte,” said Eugenia, “but it doesn’t look like it.”
“There,” Acton answered, “you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant.”
“Well,” said the Baroness, “I never guess my own lovers; so I can’t guess other people’s.”
Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. “You will be interested to hear,” the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, “of another matrimonial venture in our little circle.”
“I was just telling the Baroness,” Acton observed.
“Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement,” said Eugenia.
Mr. Wentworth’s jocosity increased. “It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton.”