'My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning! I should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome man from Randall's--I've had to bargain with him for a whole hour about taking back those sweets. I was swindled, of course, but we should have died if we'd had to eat them up. Well, now, my dears--'
The vicar's wife paused. Her square, short figure was between the two girls; she had an arm of each, and she looked significantly, from one to another, her gray curls, flapping across her face as she did so.
'Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,' cried Rose. 'You make us quite nervous.'
'How do ypu like Mr. Elsmere?' she inquired, solemnly.
Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose's smiling frankness with a little sigh. Things were going grandly, but she could imagine a disposition of affairs which would have given her personally more pleasure.
'_How--would--you--like_--him for a brother-in-law?' she inquired, beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting Rose's arm, and bringing out the last words with a rush.
'Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose's eye, but she answered for them both demurely.
'We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must explain.'
'Explain!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh. 'I should think it explains itself. At least if you'd been in this house for the last twenty-four hours you'd think so. Since the moment when he first met her, it's been "Miss Leyburn," "Miss Leyburn," all the time. One might have seen it with half an eye from the beginning.
Mrs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness backward or forward.
'He went to see you yesterday, didn't he--yes, I know he did--and he overtook her in the pony-carriage--the vicar saw them from across the valley--and he brought her back from your house, and then he kept William up till nearly twelve talking of her. And now he wants a picnic. Oh, it's plain as a pikestaff. And, my dears, _nothing_ to be said against him. Fifteen hundred a year if he's a penny. A nice living, only his mother to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever, stepped.'
Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own eloquence. The girls, who had by this time established her between them on a garden-seat, looked at her with smiling composure. They were accustomed to letting her have her budget out.