"Shall we find Lucilla?" was all he whispered back.
I had forgotten that serious difficulty. No answer to Oscar's question could possibly present itself until we reached the rectory. Between this and then, there was nothing for it but to keep patience and to keep hope.
I refrain from encumbering this part of my narrative with any detailed account of the little accidents, lucky and unlucky, which alternately hastened or retarded our journey home. Let me only say that, before midnight on the eighteenth, Oscar and I drove up to the rectory gate.
Mr. Finch himself came out to receive us, with a lamp in his hand. He lifted his eyes (and his lamp) devotionally to the sky when he saw Oscar. The two first words he said, were:—
"Inscrutable Providence!"
"Have you found Lucilla?" I asked.
Mr. Finch—with his whole attention fixed on Oscar—wrung my hand mechanically, and said I was a "good creature;" much as he might have patted, and spoken to, Oscar's companion, if the companion had been a dog. I almost wished myself that animal for the moment—I should have had the privilege of biting Mr. Finch. Oscar impatiently repeated my question; the rector, at the time, officiously assisting him to descend from the carriage, and leaving me to get out as I could.
"Did you hear Madame Pratolungo?" Oscar asked. "Is Lucilla found?"
"Dear Oscar, we hope to find her, now you have come."
That answer revealed to me the secret of Mr. Finch's extraordinary politeness to his young friend. The last chance, as things were, of preventing Lucilla's marriage to a man who had squandered away every farthing of his money, was the chance of Oscar's arrival in England before the ceremony could take place. The measure of Oscar's importance to Mr. Finch was now, more literally than ever, the measure of Oscar's fortune.