“Nothing so pretty, darling, on earth, except yourself.”
“What is my Ry looking out for?”
Charles Fairfield had more than once put his head out of the window, looking as well as he could along the road in advance of the horses.
“Oh, nothing of any consequence, I only wanted to see that our man had got on with the horse, he might as well knock up the old woman, and see that things were, I was going to say, comfortable, but less miserable than they might be.”
He laughed faintly as he said this, and he looked at his watch, as if he did not want her to see him consult it, and then he said—
“Well, and you were saying—oh—about the flowers—annuals—Yes.”
And so they resumed. But somehow it seemed to Alice that his ardour and his gaiety were subsiding, that his thoughts were away, and pale care stealing over him like the chill of death. Again she might have remembered the ghostly Wilhelm, who grew more ominous and spectral as he and his bride neared the goal of their nocturnal journey.
“I don’t think you hear me, Ry, and something has gone wrong,” she said at last in a tone of disappointment, that rose even to alarm.
“Oh! tell me, Charlie, if there is anything you have not told me yet? you’re afraid of frightening me.”
“Nothing, nothing, I assure you, darling; what nonsense you do talk, you poor foolish little bird. No, I mean nothing, but I’ve had a sort of quarrel with the old man; you need not have written that letter, or at least it would have been better if you had told me about it.”