“Not see what there is to admire in that exquisite figure and beautiful face? Why, I shall be the envy of half the girls in Manchester when I marry him!” Augusta exclaimed, with anything but the air of a culprit just detected.
“But you are not likely to marry him, you forward chit. You go back to Manchester to-morrow, and I will take good care you don’t marry either clandestinely or openly a man so sure to make your heart ache, if he were thrice as handsome!”
“But I WILL marry him, mamma—I’ll please my eye, if I plague my heart!”
“Then, as you make your bed, so must you lie, miss,” answered Mrs. Ashton, gravely and deliberately. “But take my word for it, neither your papa nor myself will give our consent. And now go to your room, Augusta, and thank God you have been saved from disgrace this night, and thank us that we have kept you from open exposure. Not even your cousin has a notion of this last folly. Our daughter’s honour is dearer to us than to herself,” and the mother’s tone softened as she spoke.
“Your daughter’s honour has never been in any danger,” said Augusta, haughtily, as she swept from the room, to encounter at the foot of the stairs, flooded by moonlight through the open window, her father—and Jabez.
Up to that moment she had stood on the defensive, her wayward spirit upholding and arming her for retort. The sight of the father who had indulged her every whim, and of Jabez whose esteem she valued more than she herself knew, gave a sudden shock to her overwrought nerves, and she fell forward into the arms of Jabez in a deep swoon.
Tenderly, respectfully, sadly, he bore her into the parlour, and placing her on the sofa, relinquished her to her mother, divesting himself of his shoes in order to procure water to restore her without creating alarm.
When she recovered he was gone; she was alone with the parents whose counsels she had despised, whose love she had wounded; herself detected and humiliated.
A greater humiliation had fallen to the lot of elate, enamoured, and self-satisfied Laurence Aspinall, when, leaving his friend Barret with the post-chaise, their saddle-horses, and Cicily at the bottom of Moor Lane, he mounted the hill and whistled softly at the entrance of the Lovers’ Walk, to call forth—not a blushing maiden, half afraid of her own temerity, but—two justly incensed and indignant men. His low-voiced “Augusta” died upon his lips; he recoiled, stammered—
“You! I—I did not expect—— D—nation! What brought you here? I thought——”