‘If she doesn’t turn him out a perfect article,’ said Paul, unconsciously quitting the mental for the actual soliloquy, ‘why, nothing and no one can. If I had been any one else, and she had commenced early enough at me, I really believe that she’d have changed old Paul Frankston into a bishop, or, at any rate, a rural dean at least; even Charley Carryall——’
But whether Captain Carryall’s utterances and anecdotes were scarcely of a nature calculated to harmonise with bishops and deans, or whether Mr. Frankston’s many engagements at this important crisis suddenly engaged his attention, can never be known with that precision which this chronicler is always anxious to supply. One thing only is certain, that he looked at his watch, and hastily arising from his arm-chair, departed into the city.
For the information of a section of readers for whom we feel much respect and gratitude, it may be mentioned that the wedding took place at St. James’s, a venerable but architecturally imperfect pile in the vicinity of Hyde Park. There be churches near Morahmee more replete with ‘miserable sinners’ in robes of Worth and garments of Poole, but Mr. Frankston would none of them. In the old church had he stood beside his mother, a schoolboy, wondering and wearied, but acquiescent, after the manner of British children; in the old church had he plighted his troth to Antonia’s sainted mother; in the old church should his darling utter her vows, and in no other. Are there any words which can fitly interpret the deep joy and endless thankfulness which fill the heart and humble the mind of him who, all unworthy, knows that the chalice of life’s deepest joy is even then past all risk and danger, steadily uplifted to his reverent lips?
Doubts there have been, delays that fretted, fears that shook the soul, clouds that dimmed, darkness that hid the sky of love. All these have sped. Here is naught but the glad and gracious Present, that blue and golden day which, pardoning and giving amnesty to the Past, beseeches, well-nigh assures, the stern veiled form of the Future.
Some of these reflections would doubtless have mingled with the contemplations of Ernest Neuchamp at Aurora’s summons on that glad morn but for an unimportant fact—that he was at that well-known poetical period most soundly asleep.