“Yes,” said Marian, laughing, but with a little charitable compassion for her own particular victim, “and you are just arriving? It is very odd--you should have come yesterday.”
“Permit me,” said Mr Endicott moodily;--“no; I am satisfied. This experience is well--I am glad to know it. To us, Miss Atheling,” said the solemn Yankee, as he gave his valuable assistance to Agnes--“to us this play and sport of fortune is but the proper training. Our business is not to enjoy; we bear these disappointments for the world.”
He put them into their humble carriage, and bowed at them solemnly. Poor Mr Endicott! He did not blush, but grew green as he stood looking after the slow equipage ere he turned to the disenchanted Willows. Though he was about to visit people of distinction, the American young gentleman, being in love, did not care to enter upon this new scene of observation and note-making at this moment; so he turned into the road, and walked on in the white cloud of dust raised by the wheels of the fly. The dust itself had a sentiment in it, and belonged to Marian; and Mr Endicott began the painful manufacture of a sonnet, expressing this “experience,” on the very spot.
“But _you_ ought not to laugh at him, Marian, even though other people do,” said Agnes, with superior virtue.
“Why not?” said the saucy beauty; “I laughed at Sir Langham--and I am sure _he_ deserved it,” she added in an under-tone.
“Marian,” said Agnes, “I think--you have named him yourself, or I should not have done it--we had better not say anything about Sir Langham to mamma.”
“I do not care at all who names him,” said Marian, pouting; but she made no answer to the serious proposition: so it became tacitly agreed between them that nothing was to be said of the superb runaway lover when they got home.
And now they were at home--the Fly dismissed, the trunks unfastened, and Agnes and Marian sitting with Mamma in the old parlour, as if they had never been away. Yes, they had been away--both of them had come in with a little start and exclamation to this familiar room, which somehow had shrunk out of its proper proportions, and looked strangely dull, dwarfed, and sombre. It was very strange; they had lived here for years, and knew every corner of every chair and every table--and they had only been gone a fortnight--yet what a difference in the well-known room!