"OUR DREAMS PURSUE OUR DEAD, AND DO NOT FIND."
Miss Vincent's engagement met with everybody's approval, with the one exception of the marriageable young ladies of the neighbourhood, who thought that Allan Carew had made a foolish choice, and might certainly have done better for himself. What good could come of marrying a girl who was neither English nor French; who had been educated in a Parisian convent, and who drove to Salisbury every Sunday morning to hear mass?
"What uncomfortable Sundays they will have!" one of these young ladies remarked to Bessie Edgefield; "and then how horrid for him to have a wife of a different creed! They are sure to quarrel about religion. Isn't the Vicar dreadfully shocked?"
"My father is rather sorry that Mr. Carew should marry a Roman Catholic. There is always the fear that he might go over to Rome——"
"Of course. He is sure to do that. It will be the only way to stop the quarrelling. She will make him a pervert."
Mrs. Mornington, on the other hand, flattered herself that, by her marriage with a member of the English Church, her niece would be brought to see the errors of Rome, and would very soon make her appearance in the family pew beside her husband.
Lady Emily cherished the same hope, since, although a less ardent Churchwoman than Mrs. Mornington, she believed in Anglicanism as the surest road to salvation, and she dwelt also upon the difficulties that might arise by-and-by about the poor dear children, talking of those potential beings as if they were already on the scene.
The Roman Church was severe upon that question, and it would perhaps be impossible for Suzette to be married in her own church unless her husband would promise that their children should be baptized and educated in the true faith.
While other people were thinking about these things for him, Allan had no room for thought of any kind, unless a lover's meditation upon the image of the girl he loved could be dignified by the name of thought. For Allan, life was a perpetual ecstasy. To be with Suzette in her own home, at the Grove, on the links, anywhere—to be with her was all he needed for bliss. For his sake, his mother had prolonged her stay at Beechhurst, in order that the two young people might be together in the house where they were to live as man and wife. It was Allan's delight to make Suzette familiar with her future home. He wanted her to feel that this was the house in which she was to live; that under her father's roof she was no longer at home; that her books, her bric-à-brac, the multifarious accumulations of a happy girlhood, might as well be transferred at once to the sunny, bow-windowed upstair room which was to be her den. It was now a plainly furnished, matter-of-fact morning room, a room in which the Admiral had kept his boots, cigar-boxes, and business documents, and transacted the fussy futilities of his unoccupied life. The mantelpiece, which had been built up with shelves and artful cupboards for the accommodation of the Admiral's cigars, would serve excellently to set off Suzette's zoological china; her Dresden pugs, and rats, and lobsters, and pigs, and rabbits, her morsels of silver, and scraps of wrought copper would adorn the shelves; and all her little odds and ends and never-to-be-finished bits of fancy-work could be neatly stowed away in the cupboards.
"But won't you want those dear little cubby-houses for your own cigars?" asked Suzette. "It seems too cruel to rob you of your uncle's snuggery. I've no doubt you smoke just as much as the Admiral."