Captain Strickland gave a great start, and a sudden light leapt to his eyes as he turned them on Janet. Her blushing cheeks were hidden by her fan, but over the top of it his eyes met hers, and in them he read something that love interpreted for him aright. In another moment he was on his knees by her side and smothering her hand with kisses.
As Janet afterwards explained to the Major: "You see, George would not propose to me. My money frightened him; so I was obliged to exercise the privilege which Leap Year gives our sex, and propose to him; and when once the ice was broken, I found him not at all shy."
The marriage did not take place till after the expiration of Janet's year of mourning. Then they went abroad, and did not return to England till Janet was turned one-and-twenty. Since that time Dupley Walls has been their home. The Major lives with them, and enjoys a green and hearty old age.
Janet has long known that it was her singular likeness to a younger sister of Lady Pollexfen, to whom the Major, when a young man, was engaged to be married, that made so deep an impression on the old soldier when he saw her first, and that first endeared her to his heart.
Janet's relatives on her father's side were not slow in making advances to her when they discovered that she was Lady Pollexfen's heiress. Janet responded graciously enough, but she was not long in discovering that the new circle of connexions into which she had been introduced, was one in which she should never feel thoroughly at home. It was too worldly and too fast in every way to please Janet's simple tastes. Her new relations would gladly have taken her in hand with the view of educating her up to their standard, and would have found her some horseracing, gambling scion of the house for a husband. But any such pleasant family arrangement was rendered null and void by the simple fact of Janet choosing a husband for herself in the person of penniless Captain Strickland. Still they could not afford to give Janet up entirely. They find Dupley Walls a convenient visiting house during the dull season, and bashfulness being a quality unknown to any of the tribe, they do not fail, when there, to make themselves thoroughly at home. Janet bears the infliction with much sweetness. She says that you cannot have aristocratic connexions without paying for the privilege in one shape or another.
It is scarcely necessary to state that Mr. Madgin's position at Dupley Walls was in no wise affected by the death of Lady Pollexfen. Janet is too fond of the old man to curtail even one of his privileges or emoluments; nor does she forget his great services in connexion with the recovery of the Diamond. Neither Mr. Madgin nor Captain Strickland has ever ventured to tell Janet that the man who stole the Diamond from M. Platzoff, and from whom it was afterwards recovered by means of a clever ruse, was none other than her own father. That is a passage of family history of which she still remains happily ignorant.
Madgin Junior is rising in his profession. He has a lucrative engagement at one of the West-end theatres. His rendering of the character of Doxy in the grand sensation drama of _From Belgravia to Newgate_ was highly spoken of by the press, and vociferously applauded by the pit. Madgin Junior being of a sanguine temperament, sees no reason why he should not in the course of time develope into a "star" of the first magnitude.
Mirpah the superb still remains unmarried, and will in all probability so remain till the end of the chapter. Several individuals have expressed a desire to take her for better or worse; but in each case Mirpah seemed to see the "worse" so clearly, and the "better" so indistinctly, that she declined the offers one and all. It is probable that no one so nearly touched her heart as Captain Ducie.
"Only think," she will sometimes say to her father, "had I been so minded, I might now have been stepmother to the present mistress of Dupley Walls!"
She still keeps her father's books and accounts, and as years creep over Mr. Madgin, so do Mirpah's labours increase. In those labours and in the hoarding of money, Mirpah Madgin, to all appearance, finds the great happiness of her life.