"Yes, do. Please come soon. But I ought not to be so grasping, and I have never thanked you properly for coming to-day. What an unmannerly brute I am. Please forgive me! Don't punish me by staying away, will you?"
She drew near, and spoke low, that Jane might not hear.
"I shall come whenever they let me," she said, with vehemence; "whenever I don't come, you will know it is because I was forbidden. If they would allow it, I'd come every single day."
CHAPTER XIX.
I find you passing gentle.
'Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen,
And now I find report a very liar;
For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous,
But slow in speech, yet sweet as spring time flowers:
Thou canst not frown, thou canst not look askance,
Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will.
Taming of the Shrew.
It was quite an unusual event for Miss Charlotte Willoughby to be standing on the platform watching the arrival of the London train. Her preparation for the expedition had been made in quite a flutter of expectation. She was resolved to do her duty thoroughly by Godfrey Brabourne, much as she had disliked his mother. She had hopes that a stay in a household of such strict propriety, where peace, order, and regularity reigned supreme, might perchance work an improvement in the boy, do something to eradicate the pernicious influence of early training, and cause him, in after life, to own with a burst of emotion that he dated the turning-point in his career from the moment when his foot first trod the threshold of Edge Willoughby. This was a consummation so devoutly to be wished, as to go far towards reconciling the good lady to the presence of a boy in the virgin seclusion of the house. Elsa, at her side, was stirred to the deepest depths of her excitable temperament, each faculty poised, each nerve a-quiver as she hung bashfully back behind her aunt.
There was a long wild howl, a dog's howl, followed by a series of sharp yelps and a sound of scuffling; a crowd collected round the dog-box. A small boy in an Eton suit dashed down the platform, parted the spectators right and left, and revealed to view the panic-stricken guard, with a bull-dog hanging to his trousers.