I maintained my silence while she went on with her Hamlet without the Prince, that is to say, while she talked of the now demolished Business College without mentioning Archie Merridew, Kitty Windus, Louie Causton and the rest; and then, pleading an engagement, I rose. She rose too. With her purse in her hand, she made quite an ado about refusing to allow me to pay for the lunch to which I had invited her. "Please—or I shall feel as if we can't lunch together again!" she said; "let me see; sevenpence, that's right, isn't it? There! You will remember me to Evie, won't you?"
And she scrupulously put the sevenpence into one of my hands while with the other I held the door open for her to pass out.
I did not give Evie Miss Levey's message that evening, for when, at a little after seven, I reached the Vale of Health, I found Miss Angela there. The elder Miss Soames, I ought to say, regarded our wedding as so exclusively Evie's (myself sometimes appearing to have no part whatever in it) that I was constantly invited to share her own detached delight. Giving up Evie's bedroom only, she intended to stay on at Woburn Place; but from the number of offerings she brought us her own sitting-room was like to be sadly denuded. She brought, and if possible hid in a corner for us to discover after she had left, heavy old silver tablespoons, her shield-shaped embroidered fire-screen, her Colport dressing-table set with the little coral-like trees for rings, and other gifts; and it was in vain that Evie laughingly protested.
"But if you go on like this we shall have to have you come and live with us!" she said. "Make you up a bed on the verandah—but perhaps that's what she's really after, Jeff——"
But Miss Angela shook her head demurely, ignoring the joke. "No, no—young people ought to be alone; they don't want old things like me interfering. I shall be just as happy thinking of you both as if it was my own wedding."
And I really believe she was.
For the Etiquette of our preparations, Aunt Angela threw herself pathetically on my mercy.
Her sitting-room in Woburn Place, however, was not the only one that was rapidly becoming denuded. My own place with the terra-cotta festoons and hobgoblins was now more than half empty. But I was not relinquishing it yet. I knew I was committing a sentimental extravagance in thus being lord of two domiciles, but (Etiquette having to be considered) I did not wish to go into the new place until I should go there with Evie. So already two cartloads of my belongings had been fetched away, and that very day Miss Angela had been assisting in a task that more than any other seemed the beginning of the end—the removal of my carpet. They did not tell me of this removal. They allowed me to discover it for myself when I went, without light, upstairs into the drawing-room. They had already laid it down; my foot struck its softness in the dark; and I experienced a sudden little thrill of pleasure. It seemed to bring all so suddenly near....
They had crept up after me with a lamp to enjoy my surprise. The room really looked delightful, and all my sense of drawbacks vanished. Four glass candle-sconces with musical little drops—I had picked them up cheap in the street that runs from the Britannia to Regent's Park—were fastened to the walls, two between the window-bays over my breast-high mahogany bookshelves, the other two at the sides of the fireplace in the opposite wall; and across the windows themselves the long chintz curtains were drawn. Evie set the lamp down on the little table that folded almost to nothing against the wall, and tripped round with a taper, lighting up. All my chairs were there, and the couch for which I had ransacked half the catacombs of the Tottenham Court Road, and I can't tell you how pretty it all was, with its ivory woodwork, its dark blue and crimson blotted carpet, and the candle flames turning the polished glass lustres to soft sprinklings of gems. Miss Angela, delicate Pandar, seeing Evie's hand steal towards mine, affected to be very busy at the mantelpiece....