“Sir,” said Thornby, fiercely, conceiving himself and his county alike disparaged, “I find these parts quite good enough for me.”
“Indeed, I envy you,” said Foxwell, with a slight plaintiveness. “I wish from my heart I could say I find them good enough for me—since I am doomed to live in them.”
That anything good enough for Thomas Thornby could not be good enough for another man was not a proposition soothing to Thomas Thornby’s soul. Having no fit retort within present grasp of his tongue, however, and knowing that even if he had one, his adversary would find a better one to cap it with, the Squire contented himself with a fiery glare and an inward curse. Then saying abruptly to his servant, “See that my dinner is served the moment it’s ready, Bartholomew,” he entered the inn and tramped up the stairs with great weight of heel.
Foxwell laughed scarce audibly, and followed with a step as light as the other’s was heavy. Emerging from the stair-head to a passage that divided the rear from the front rooms, he went into one of the latter, where he found the table set, and his niece and her maid at the window, looking down at the street. Across the way were a baker’s shop, a draper’s, a rival inn with gables and a front of timber and plaster; and so forth. A butcher’s boy with a tray of meat, a townswoman with a child by the hand, and two dogs tumbling over each other, were the moving figures in the scene—until a clatter of horses and a rumble of wheels were heard, and then the maid exclaimed:
“Lor, mistress, what a handsome coach, to be sure! And see the man servant on the horse behind. People of great fashion, I’ll warrant. And they’re coming to this very inn!”
Miss Foxwell watched listlessly till the vehicle—the private coach already mentioned as approaching the town from the North—had disappeared beneath the window from which she looked.
Foxwell had been standing at the empty fireplace, heedless of what might be seen in the street. He now spoke, carelessly:
“You saw the amiable gentleman who stood below, Georgiana, and who passed this door with so fairy-like a tread as I came up?”
“I didn’t observe him,” replied Georgiana. “Somebody passed very noisily.”
“The same. I thought you might remember him from the days before you left home. But, to be sure, you were a child then, and he, too, was younger. He is one of our neighbours, Squire Thornby.”