He heard the next day that his brother was non est, and, in his own phraseology, that there was a pretty kettle of fish in the City.
"Upon my word, Phil and I seem to have brought our pigs to a very nice market," he said. "I dare say, wherever that fellow has gone, he has carried a well-lined purse with him. But I wouldn't have his conscience for all the wealth of the Rothschilds. It's bad enough to see Tom Halliday's face as I see it sometimes. What must it be to him?"
A little more than a year after this, and the yellow corn was waving on the fertile plains of Normandy, fruit ripening in orchards on hillside and in valley; merry holiday folks splashing and dabbling in the waves that wash the yellow sands of Dieppe; horses coming to grief in Norman steeplechases; desperate gamesters losing their francs and half-francs in all kinds of frivolous games in the Dieppe établissement; and yonder, in the heart of Normandy, beyond the tall steeples of Rouen, a happy family assembled at the Chateau Côtenoir.
One happy family—two happy families rather, but so closely united by the bonds of love and friendship as to seem indeed one. Here are Gustave Lenoble and his young wife Diana, with two tall slender damsels by their side; and here is Valentine Hawkehurst, the successful young scribbler, with his fair young wife Charlotte; and out on the terrace yonder are two nurses walking with two babies, at that early, and, to some minds, obnoxious stage of babyhood in which a perpetual rocking, and pacing to and fro, and swaying backwards and forwards in the air, is necessary for the preservation of anything approaching tranquillity. But to the minds of the two young mothers and the two proud fathers, these small creatures in their long white robes seem something too bright for earth. The united ages of the babies do not amount to six months; but the mothers have counted every gradual stage of these young lives, and to both it seems as if there had been no time in which the children were not, with so firm a hold have they possessed themselves of every thought in the foolish maternal mind, of every impulse in the weak maternal heart.
Mrs. Hawkehurst has brought her son to see his aunt Diana; for Diana has insisted upon assuming that relationship by letters-patent, as it were. Madame Lenoble's baby is a daughter, and this fact in itself seems to the two friends to be a special interposition of Providence.
"Would it not be delightful if they should grow up to love each other and marry?" exclaimed Diana; and Charlotte agreed with her that such an event in the future did indeed seem in a manner foreshadowed by the conduct of the infants in the present.
"He takes notice of her already!" she exclaimed, looking out at the little creature in white muslin robes, held up against the warm blue sky; "see, they are cooing at each other! I am sure that must be cooing."
And then the two mothers went out upon the sunny terrace-walk and fondly contemplated these domestic treasures, until the domestic treasures were seized with some of the inexplicable throes and mysterious agonies of early babyhood, and had to be borne off shrieking to their nurseries.
"Dear angel," said Gustave, of his "little last one," "she has the very shriek of Clarice here, poignant and penetrating, until to drown the heart. Dost thou figure to thyself that thy voice was penetrating as that, my beautiful, in the time?"
He kissed his beautiful, and she ran off to join the procession following the two babies,—alarmed nurses, distracted mammas, shrieking infants, anxious damsels.