It is a
poignant picture to rend the heart. But what does it matter, Miss Paget?
What is that verse of your grand Will?--
Blow, blow, thou wintry wind;
And let go weep the stricken land,
While harts ungalled go play.
Perhaps I have mixed him up somehow; but the meaning is clear."
A hollow-sounding and somewhat awful cough heralded the approach of
Captain Paget, who entered the room at this juncture. If the Captain had
prolonged his first airing, after six weeks' confinement to the house,
until this late period of the afternoon, he would have committed an
imprudence which might have cost him dearly. Happily, he had done nothing
of the kind, but had re-entered the house unobserved, while Diana and
Gustave were conversing close to the window, having preferred to leave
his fly at the end of the street, rather than to incur the hazard of
interrupting a critical tete-a-tete. The interval that had elapsed since
his return had been spent by the Captain in his own bedchamber, and in
the immediate neighbourhood of the folding-doors between that apartment
and the parlour. What he had heard had been by no means satisfactory to
him; and if a look could annihilate, Miss Paget might have perished
beneath the Parthian glance which her father shot at her as he came
towards the window, with a stereotyped smile upon his lips and
unspeakable anger in his heart.
He had heard just enough of the conversation to know that Gustave had
been rejected--Gustave, with Cotenoir and a handsome independence in the
present, and the late John Haygarth's fortune in the future.
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