"And I am to cost you money at the very beginning!" she said dolefully.
"Dearest, it will be bliss to spend my money in such sweet service."
"Ah, but wait! I have twenty guineas in my purse, which my father gave me a week ago, my quarterly allowance of pocket-money. That will buy all I shall want for the present; and I daresay he will let me have my clothes from Fairmile. However angry he may be, he will scarcely insist upon keeping my clothes."
"It would assuredly be a petty form of resentment. Well, dearest, may I go shopping with you? or would you rather go alone in a chair?"
"I would rather go with you."
"Then we'll just walk quietly into Holborn, as if we were an old married couple."
Irene put on her cloak and hood in front of a Venetian glass, while Herrick walked up and down the room and glanced somewhat uneasily from the windows, expecting the Squire's arrival.
They had breakfasted in a leisurely fashion, and it was now two o'clock. There had been ample time for Mr. Bosworth to go to Parson Keith, and having obtained his information from the parson, who knew the destination of the newly-married couple, to come on to Bloomsbury Square. Yet there was still no sign of pursuit. Nor did anything occur all that afternoon to interrupt the serenity of the bride and bridegroom. They went together to the mercer's and to the milliner's, and Irene made her purchases on a very modest scale, and well within the limits of her pocket-money, while her husband discreetly waited at the door of the shop, and exercised a patience rare after the halcyon days of the honeymoon.
"How good you are to wait for me!" said Irene, as she rejoined him; "shopkeepers are so slow, and they pester one so to buy more than one wants."
"If you were like Mrs. Skerritt, who haunts every sale-room and bids for everything she sees, your catalogue of wants would not be completed half so easily," answered Herrick; "jealous though I am of your absence, I must own you have been vastly quick."