“Ashamed of his name? Oh, no, no!”
“Why keep your real name a secret, then?”
“I can’t tell you why. But you’ll keep your promise. You are too honourable to break your promise.”
Mr. Monckton looked wonderingly at the girl’s earnest face.
“No, my dear, I won’t break my promise,” he said. “But I can’t understand your anxiety for this concealment. However, we will say nothing more about it, Nelly,” he added, as if in reply to an appealing look from Miss Vane; “your name will be Monckton when you go back to Berkshire; and nobody will dare to question your right to that name.”
The lawyer put his lips to the girl’s forehead, and bade her good night upon the threshold of the shoemaker’s door.
“God bless you, my own darling!” he said, in a very low voice, “and preserve our faith in each other. There must be no secrets between you and me, Nelly.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN INSIDIOUS DEMON.
On a bright September morning a hired carriage took Miss Vane and her friends to the quiet old church in Hart Street, Bloomsbury. There was a little crowd assembled about the door of the shoemaker’s dwelling, and sympathetic spectators were scattered here and there in the mews, for a marriage is one of those things which the cleverest people can never contrive to keep a secret.
Miss Eleanor Vane’s pale fawn-coloured silk dress, black mantle, and simple white bonnet did not form the established costume of a bride, but the young lady looked so very beautiful in her girlish dress and virginal innocence, that more than one of the lounging grooms who came out of the stables to see her go by to her hired carriage, confidentially remarked to an acquaintance that he only wished he could get such a young woman for his missus. Richard Thornton was not in attendance upon the fair young bride. There was a scene to be painted for Spavin and Cromshaw upon that particular day which was more important than any scene Dick had ever painted before. So the young man set out early upon that September bridal morning, after saluting Eleanor Vane in the most tender and brotherly fashion but I am sorry to say that instead of going straight to the Royal Phœnix Theatre, Mr. Thornton walked with a slow and listless gait across Westminster Bridge, then plunged with a sudden and almost ferocious impetus into the remotest intricacies of Lambeth, scowling darkly at the street boys who came in his way, skirting the Archbishop’s palace, glowering at the desolation of Vauxhall, and hurrying far away into the solitudes of Battersea Fields, where he spent the better part of the afternoon in the dreary parlour of an obscure public-house, drinking adulterated beer, and smoking bad tobacco.