"By George! I believe I ought to have said something; but, hang it, what could a fellow say?"
He hears the coach driving off, and with a sudden thought rushes home, enters quietly, goes up the stairs, makes a feint as if he were entering his chamber, but passes on tiptoe into the garret, opens the roof-door, and from the housetop catches a last glimpse of the stage-coach rattling down the south road. A wood hides it presently.
"Confound it all!" he says, with great heartiness, and goes down to dinner.
"My son, you haven't a good appetite," says the kindly mother.
"I ate a big lunch," says Phil.
He knew it was a whopper.
XXXIII.
It is at Jennings's old City Hotel, far down Broadway, that Maverick has taken rooms and awaits the arrival of Adèle. That glimpse of her upon the street of Ashfield (ay, he knew it must be she!) has added pride to the instinctive love of the parent. The elastic step, the graceful figure, the beaming, sunny face,—they all haunt him; they put him in a fever of expectation. He reads over again the few last letters of hers under a new light; up and down along the page, that lithe, tall figure is always coming forward, and the words of endearment are coupled with that sunny face.
He even prepares his toilette to meet her, as a lover might do to meet his affianced. And the meeting, when it comes, only deepens the pride. Graceful? Yes! That bound toward him,—can anything be fuller of grace? Natural? The look and the speech of Adèle are to Maverick a new revelation of Nature. Loving? That clinging kiss of hers was worth his voyage over the sea.
And she, too, is so beautifully proud of her father! She has loved the Doctor for his serenity, his large justice, notwithstanding his stiffness and his awkward gravity; but she regards with new eyes the manly grace of her father, his easy self-possession, his pliability of talk, his tender attention to her comfort, his wistful gaze at her, so full of a yearning affection, which, if the Doctor had ever felt, he had counted it a duty to conceal. Nay, the daughter, with a womanly eye, took pride in the aptitude and becomingness of his dress,—so different from what she had been used to see in the clumsy toilette of the Doctor, or of the good-natured Squire Elderkin. Henceforth she will have a new standard of comparison, to which her lovers, if they ever declare themselves, must submit.