And ere anyone had asked “What time is it?” daylight was stealing into the candle light and then there was only the cheerful hurry of cloaking and parting left, and the long-looked-for happiness was over. Yet after all it was a day by itself and the dower of To-morrow can never be weighed by the gauge of Yesterday.
_“Right! There is a battle cry in the word. You feel as if you had drawn a sword. A royal word, a conquering word, which if the weakest speak, they straight grow strong.”_
LADY LEYLAND had ordered breakfast at ten o’clock and at that hour her guests were ready for it. Mistress Temple and Katherine showed no signs of weariness, but Lord Ley-land looked bored and Mistress Annis was silent concerning the squire and his manner of passing the night. Then Leyland said:
“By George! Madam, you are very right to be anxious. The company of ladies always makes me anxious. I will go to my club and read the papers. I feel that delay is no longer possible.”
“Your breakfast, Fred,” cried Katherine, but Fred was as one that heard not, and with a smile and a good-by which included all present, Leyland disappeared, and as his wife smilingly endorsed his
and anxious but soon voiced her trouble in a wish forget everything else but now if I can be excused apologies, no one made the slightest attempt to detain him. Certainly Mistress Annis looked curiously at her daughter and, when the door was closed, said:
“I wonder at you, Jane--Leyland had not drank his first cup of coffee and as to his breakfast it is still on his plate. It is not good for a man to go to politics fasting.”
“O mother! you need not worry about Fred’s breakfast. He will order one exactly to his mind as soon as he reaches his club and he will be ten times happier with the newspapers than with us.”
Just at this point the squire and his son entered the room together and instantly the social temperature of the place rose.
“I met Leyland running away from you women,” said the squire. “Whatever hev you been doing to him?”
“He wanted to see the papers, father,” said Katherine.
“It was a bit of bad behavior,” said Madam Temple.
“Oh, dear, no,” Jane replied. “Fred is incapable of anything so vulgar. Is he not, father?”
“To be sure he is. No doubt it was a bit of fine feeling for the women present that sent him off. He knew you would want to discuss the affair of last night and also the people mixed up in it and he felt he would be in everybody’s way, and so he was good-natured enough to leave you to the pleasure of describing one another. It was varry agreeable and polite for Fred to do so. I hedn’t sense enough to do the same.”