“Suppose he doesn’t,” exclaimed her sister, contemptuously. “Did you ever hear of a bridegroom giving watches? Of course, the bridesmaids are supposed to have watches. Their fathers give them watches directly they are in their teens, unless they are hard-up, like our father. I shouldn’t wonder if he were to give us diamond arrow brooches.”
Hetty had seen a diamond arrow in Lady Hartley’s bonnet-strings, and had conceived a passion for that ornament.
“What do you bet that it will be diamond arrows?”
“There’s no use in betting. If you lose, one never gets paid.”
“I don’t often have any money,” Peggy replied naively; and then came a knocking at the lath and plaster partition, and Sophy’s sharp voice remonstrating—
“Are you children never going to leave off chattering? You are worse than the swallows in the morning.”
There was one blissfullest of days for Peggy during the week before the wedding, a balmy June morning on which Vansittart came in a dog-cart to take Eve and her youngest sister to Haslemere station, whence the train carried them through a smiling land, perfumed with bean blossoms and those fragrant spices which pine woods exhale under the summer sun, to Liss, where another dog-cart was waiting for them, and whence they drove past copse and common to Merewood, Vansittart’s very own house, to which he brought his future wife on a visit of inspection—“to see if she would like any alterations,” he said.
“As if any one could want to alter such a lovely house,” exclaimed Peggy, who was allowed to run about and pry into every hole and corner, and open all the wardrobes and drawers, except in Mrs. Vansittart’s rooms, where everything was looked at with almost religious reverence.
There were boxes packed already in this lady’s dressing-room, the note of departure already sounded.