"Nor I. But she ought to know a little more of society before she has to enter it as your wife. I don't think a London season will spoil her—and it will please me to chaperon her—though I have no doubt I shall seem rather an old-fashioned chaperon."
"That is just possible," said Angus, smiling, as he thought how closely his divinity was guarded. "The chaperons of the present day are very easy-going people—or, perhaps I ought to say, that the young ladies of the present day have a certain Yankee go-a-headishness which very much lightens the chaperon's responsibility. In point of fact, the London chaperon has dwindled into a formula, and no doubt she will soon be improved off the face of society."
"So much the worse for society," answered the lady of the old school. And then she continued, with a friendly air,—
"I dare say you know that I have a house in Bolton Row. I have not lived in it since my husband's death—but it is mine, and I can have it made comfortable between this and the early spring. I have been thinking that it would be better for you and Christabel to be married in London. The law business would be easier settled—and you may have relations and friends who would like to be at your wedding, yet who would hardly care to come to Boscastle."
"It is a long way," admitted Angus. "And people are so inconsistent. They think nothing of going to the Engadine, yet grumble consumedly at a journey of a dozen hours in their native land—as if England were not worth the exertion."
"Then I think we are agreed that London is the best place for the wedding," said Mrs. Tregonell.
"I am perfectly content. But if you suggested Timbuctoo I should be just as happy."
This being settled, Mrs. Tregonell wrote at once to her agent, with instructions to set the old house in Bolton Row in order for the season immediately after Easter, and Christabel and her lover had to reconcile their minds to the idea of a long dreary winter of severance.
Miss Courtenay had grown curiously grave and thoughtful since her engagement—a change which Jessie, who watched her closely, observed with some surprise. It seemed as if she had passed from girlhood into womanhood in the hour in which she pledged herself to Angus Hamleigh. She had for ever done with the thoughtless gaiety of youth that knows not care. She had taken upon herself the burden of an anxious, self-sacrificing love. To no one had she spoken of her lover's precarious hold upon life; but the thought of by how frail a tenure she held her happiness was ever present with her. "How can I be good enough to him?—how can I do enough to make his life happy?" she thought, "when it may be for so short a time."
With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent hope that the sentence might be revoked—that the doom pronounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, after all? The same dire announcement of untimely death had been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow—not always in the smoothest waters—to steer his frail bark into the haven of old age. Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient oratory above St. Nectan's Kieve, one sunny November morning, Miss Bridgeman rambling on the crest of the hill, with the black sheep-dog, Randie, under the polite fiction of blackberry hunting, among hedges which had long been shorn of their last berry, though the freshness of the lichens and ferns still lingered in this sheltered nook.