All this came to Patty in a moment, as she sat with her sharp speeches all arrested on her lips. The pause she made was not long, but it was long enough to show him that she had begun to think, and we all know that the woman who deliberates is lost; and it was in the nature of the practical-minded lover, who was not given to the sentimental, as it was also in Patty’s nature, to carry things by a _coup de main_. He sprang up from the seat he had taken opposite to her, and suddenly, before she was aware, gave Patty a hearty kiss which seemed to sound through all the silent house.
“Don’t you think any more about it,” he said, holding her fast; “you jilted me before, but you’re not going to jilt me again. I ’ave the ’ouse in my eye, and I know the jolly life we’ll live in it: lots of company and lots of fun, and two folks that is fond of one another; that’s better than living all alone--a little more grand, but no fun at all.”
And to such a triumphant and convincing argument, which her heart and every faculty acknowledged, what could Patty reply?
It was only a few weeks after this that there appeared in the newspapers, which had all reported at such length the great trial of Piercey _versus_ Piercey, a paragraph which perhaps caused as much commotion through the county as the news of any great public event for many years. Parliament had risen, and the papers were very thankful for a new sensation of any kind. The paragraph was to this effect:--
“Our readers have not forgotten the trial of Piercey _v._ Piercey, which unfolded so curious a page of family history, and roused so many comments through the whole English-speaking world. It is seldom that so many elements of human interest are collected in a single case, and the effect it produced on the immense audience which followed its developments day by day was extraordinary. The public took sides, as on an affair of imperial importance, for and against the heroine, who, from the bar-room of a roadside inn, found herself elevated in a single year to the position of a considerable landowner, with an ancient historical house and a name well known in the annals of the country. How she attained these honours, whether by the most worthy and admirable means, by unquestionable self-devotion to her husband and father-in-law, or by undue influence, exercised first on a young man of feeble intellect, and afterwards on an old gentleman in his dotage, was the question debated in almost every sociable assembly.