Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! I always knew you'd come to see." ... And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that there existed no Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last moment.
Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes out with envy, Old Thing."
Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was Meant."
While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come round in the end. I know women!"
And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might think.
Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how interested he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."
Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so soon to wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this complete aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed wooden cases was almost irritating. People were constantly coming up to the scratch, too, and relations who, in the event of the prospective bridegroom's comparative penury, would have considered pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of life unto which it had pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present circumstances, producing eight-day clocks and jewellery.
Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives who would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over the girl destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.
"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as high as the Greville-Mainwarings in that respect." She trusted Lady Cardew had rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a first cousin of Clifford's father, emerged presently, from the mist of introductions, as an untidy, acidly cheerful old lady, much more interested in horse-racing than in Clifford; though she had been overheard to express a hope that his fiancée had not bitten off more than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced Ferlie's mother that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by the front door.
The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to come in default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.