“You are alone here every morning?”
Her lips could barely frame a “Yes,” when a voice and step in the hall warned her to close the window with a hurried gesture to him; and before Mrs. Ashton, who had lingered to give an order to James, could enter the room, Black Ralph was cantering towards the Portico, and Augusta occupied with the third volume of “Alinda, or the Child of Mystery.”
Very little escaped Mrs. Ashton’s eye. The clatter of hoofs on the flags, audible through the thick front door, had left no sensible impression on her brain, but the heightened colour of Augusta attracted her attention at once. She brought her work-basket from the panel-cupboard, took thence a strip of cambric muslin, and handed it to her daughter.
“My dear,” said she, quietly, “‘all play makes no hay.’ Your eyes are younger than mine, and I think it will do you more good to hem your father’s shirt-frills than to pore over sentimental books from morning until night. So much romance-reading is not good for you. I see that you are quite flushed and excited over the one you are perusing now.”
There was a sharp rat-tat on the lion’s head, and in burst Mr. Ashton, much more flushed and excited than his daughter. He had met Mr. Laurence on Black Ralph just as he was quitting the Portico, after an angry discussion with Mr. Aspinall the elder.
“You are quite right, my dear, in saying, ‘Like father, like son,’” cried he, “for I’ll swallow my snuff-box if that pompous old cotton-merchant did not justify his scapegrace son in his attempt to carry off our Augusta! He said that ‘the end justified the means,’ that we ‘ought to be proud of such an alliance’”—Mrs. Ashton’s lip curled—“that ‘he was glad Miss Ashton had more discernment than her parent,’ that ‘his boy had set his heart upon her, and should not be thwarted in his choice by any beggar’s-inkle-weaver in England.’ And no sooner had I left him in the reading-room, to digest my opinion on the subject, and put my foot on the steps of the Portico, than up rode young Hopeful, and took off his hat to me, bowing down to his black’s horse’s mane.”
Having delivered himself of this explosive intelligence, Mr. Ashton walked about, and sought a sedative in his snuff-box; and Augusta, who, folding the hem of the frill, had not lost one word, said, drily,
“I think Mr. Aspinall’s justification of his son’s design may at least be taken as a vindication of Mr. Laurence’s honourable intentions, of which so many doubts have been expressed. And the bow equally absolves Laurence from a charge of malice.”
With a proud toss of her shapely head, she walked towards the dining-room, rejecting the proffered arm of Jabez, who had entered the parlour whilst Mr. Ashton was speaking, and thus closed a discussion which could not be continued in the presence of servants.