“Oh, good gracious! And Eleanor——”
“Eleanor will stay here. You and I will go to Nice, Laura, and cure ourselves of our follies—if we can. Don’t bring any unnecessary load of luggage. Have your most useful dresses and your linen packed in a couple of portmanteaus, and let all be ready in an hour’s time. We must leave Windsor by the four o’clock train.”
“And my wedding things—what am I to do with them?”
“Pack them up. Burn them, if you like,” answered Gilbert Monckton, leaving his ward to get over her astonishment as she best might.
He encountered her maid in the passage.
“Miss Mason’s portmanteau must be packed in an hour, Jane,” he said. “I am going to take her away at once for change of air.”
Mr. Monckton went down stairs to his study, and shutting himself in, wrote a very long letter, the composition of which seemed to give him a great deal of trouble.
He looked at his watch when this letter was finished, folded, and addressed. It was a quarter past two. He went up stairs once more to Laura’s dressing-room, and found that young lady in the wildest state of confusion, doing all in her power to hinder her maid, under the pretence of assisting her.
“Put on your bonnet and shawl and go down stairs, Laura,” Mr. Monckton said, decisively. “Jane will never succeed in packing those portmanteaus while you are fidgeting her. Go down into the drawing-room, and wait there till the boxes are packed and we’re ready to start.”
“But mustn’t I go and say good-bye to Eleanor?”