"I do believe you are not a bit wiser than I am. I hear the carriage: that's Lady Arthur come back. How surprised she will be!"
"I am not so sure of that," George said. "I'll go and meet her."
When he appeared Lady Arthur shook hands tranquilly and said, "How do you do?"
"Very well," he said. "I have been testing the value of certain documents you sent me, and find they are worth their weight in gold."
She looked in his face.
"Alice is mine," he said, "and we are going to Bashan for our wedding-tour. If you'll seize the opportunity of our escort, you may hunt up Og's bed."
"Thank you," she said: "I fear I should be de trop."
"Not a bit; but even if you were a great nuisance, we are in the humor to put up with anything."
"I'll think of it. I have never traveled in the character of a nuisance yet—at least, so far as I know—and it would be a new sensation: that is a great inducement."
Lady Arthur rushed to Miss Adamson's room with the news, and the two ladies had first a cry and then a laugh over it. "Alice will be duchess yet," said Lady Arthur: "that boy's life has hung so long by a thread that he must be prepared to go, and he would be far better away from the cares and trials of this world, I am sure;" which might be the truth, but it was hard to grudge the boy his life.