“Why, Miss Alice, dear, you’re not frettin’ for that?” said Dulcibella. “Don’t you know, dear, if he isn’t here he’s somewhere else? We’re not to be troubling ourselves about every little thing like, and who knows, poor gentleman, what’s happened to delay him?”
“That’s just what I say, Dulcibella; you’ll set me mad! Something has certainly happened. You know he owes money. Do you think they have arrested him? If they have, what’s to become of us? Oh! Dulcibella, do tell me what you really think.”
“No, no, no—there now—there’s a darling, don’t you be worrying yourself about nothing; look out again, and who knows but he’s coming?”
So said old Dulcibella, who was constitutionally hopeful and contented, and very easy about Master Charles, as she still called Charles Fairfield.
She was not remarkable for prescience, but here the worthy creature fluked prophetically; for Alice Maybell, taking her advice, did look out again, and she thought she saw the distant figure of a horseman in pursuit.
She rattled at the window calling to the driver, and the man who sat beside him, and succeeded in making them hear her, and pull the horses up.
“Look back and see if that is not your master coming,” she cried eagerly.
He was still too distant for recognition, but the rider was approaching fast. The gentlemen of the road, once a substantial terror, were now but a picturesque tradition; the appearance of the pursuing horseman over the solitudes of Cressley Common would else have been anything but a source of pleasant anticipation. On he came, and now the clink of the horse-shoes sounded sharp on the clear night air. And now the rider passed the straggling trees they had just left behind them, and now his voice was raised and recognised, and in a few moments more, pale and sad in the white moonlight as Leonora’s phantom trooper, her stalwart lover pulled up his powerful hunter at the chaise window.
A smile lighted up his gloomy face as he looked in.
“Well, darling, I have overtaken you at Cressley Common; and is my little woman quite well, and happy to see her Ry once more?”