Not until ten o’clock did Mr. Hill leave, with the understanding that he should return the next morning at the same hour. The servants were beginning to lay the breakfast-table in the dining-room, for a lot of sweet dishes had been brought in from the pastry-cook’s, and Lady Whitney thought they had better be put on the table at once. In the afternoon we had tied the cards together—“Mr. and Mrs. Richard Foliott”—with white satin ribbon, sealed them up in their envelopes with white wax, and directed them ready for the post on the morrow.
At twelve o’clock a move was made to go upstairs to bed; and until that hour we had still been expecting Captain Foliott.
“I feel positive some dreadful accident has happened,” whispered Helen to me as she said good-night, her usually bright colour faded to paleness. “If I thought it was carelessness that is causing the delay, as they are cruelly saying, I—I should never forgive him.”
“Wait a minute,” said Bill to me aside, touching Tod also. “Let them go on.”
“Are you not coming, William?” said Lady Whitney.
“In two minutes, mother.”
“I don’t like this,” began Bill, speaking to us both over our bed-candles, for the other lights were out. “I’ll be hanged if I think he means to turn up at all!”
“But why should he not?”
“Who is to know? Why has he not turned up already? I can tell you that it seems to me uncommonly strange. Half-a-dozen times to-night I had a great mind to call my father out and tell him about what you heard in the train, Tod. It is so extraordinary for a man, coming up to his wedding, not to appear: especially when he is bringing the settlements with him.”
Neither of us spoke. What, indeed, could we say to so unpleasant a topic? Bill went on again.