"Mais, comme il est innocent, your good old friend there!"
"I wish to God, Pierre, I were as innocent as he," said Maverick, and tossed his cigar over the edge of the balcony.
Upon his arrival at New York, Maverick did not communicate directly with the Doctor, enjoying the thought, very likely, of surprising his old friend by his visit, very much as he had surprised him many years before. He takes boat to a convenient point upon the shore of the Sound, and thence chooses to approach the town that holds what is most dear to him by an old, lumbering stage-coach, which still plies across the hills, as twenty years before, through the parish of Ashfield. The same patches of tasselled corn, (it is August,) the same outlying bushy pastures, the same reeling walls of mossy cobble-stones meet his eye that he remembered on his previous visit. But he looks upon all wayside views carelessly,—as one seeing, and yet not seeing them.
His daughter Adèle, she who parted from him a toy-child eight years gone, whom a new ribbon would amuse in that day, must have changed. That she has not lost her love of him, those letters have told; that she has not lost her girlish buoyancy, he knows. She must be tall now, and womanly in stature, he thinks. She promised to be graceful. That he will love her, he feels; but will he be proud of her? A fine figure, a sweet, womanly voice, an arch look, a winning smile, a pretty coquetry of glance,—will he find these? And does he not build his pride on hope of these? Will she be clever? Will there be traces, ripened in these last years, of the mother,—offensive traces possibly?
But Maverick is what the world calls a philosopher; he hums, unconsciously, a snatch of a French song, by which he rouses the attention of the spectacled old lady, (the only other occupant of the coach,) with whom he has already made some conversational ventures, and who has just finished a lunch which she has drawn from her capacious work-bag. Reviving now under the influence of Maverick's chance fragment of song, and dusting the crumbs from her lap, she says,—
"We don't have very good singin' now in the Glostenbury meetin'."
"Ah!" says Maverick.
"No: Squire Peter's darters have bin gittin' married, and the young girls ha'n't come on yit."
"You attend the Glostenbury Church, then, Madam?" says Maverick, who enjoys the provincialisms of her speech, like a whiff of the lilac perfume which he once loved.