The Country Gentleman Read Free

that her friend had not at first credited the justice of Lady Guilfoyle’s prediction. By the time she did it was too late: Anne was in love. Whatever the case, when, quite without expecting it, the Guilfoyle party discovered themselves engaged to stop through the whole of January at a house where Lord Ensley also was a guest, the two young people renewed their acquaintance with a delight and a naturalness that made Lady Guilfoyle’s heart sink.
    At about this time, Lady Guilfoyle began to be ill. Mother and daughter returned to London in the middle of February; Maria went back at last to Halfwistle House. The irony of her passing nearly a year in London yet remaining unattached, only to encounter her future husband the very week she went home (her older brother Frank brought him there, a very dashing Captain Insel, of Frank’s own regiment), was widely, and humorously, remarked upon for many months in the neighbourhood of Eling-on-Duckford. The wedding came in April, butAnne Guilfoyle was conspicuously absent: her mother had succumbed to a wasting fever and died in March.
    The bereaved Miss Guilfoyle remained in London, spurning a half-hearted invitation from Overton to make her home there once more. With Miss Gully to chaperon her, her mother’s fortune to support her, and the sedatest entertainments of the Season for diversion, she set about, deeply grieving, to make number 3, Holies Street her own establishment. How welcome, then, was the warm friendship of Lord Ensley! How comforting his attentions! Maria being gone with her new husband to Canada (her brother’s battalion, unhappily, was posted elsewhere) Ensley became the solace of Anne’s mourning. This new Season, and every Season after that for ten years, she owned openly to a particular friendship with him. And when her mourning was over, she went out into society not to find a husband, but to talk, and argue, and laugh. Which, as the reader has heard, she succeeded in doing extremely well, ever more gaily, and within increasingly rarefied circles.
    A soberer and more nervous Maria than had left it returned to Holies Street some eight years later, just when Miss Gully’s retirement could be postponed no longer. She wore black, then lavender, and spoke little of her husband, who was generally understood to have been killed accidentally during manoeuvres. Mrs. Insel’s spirits gradually lightening with the passing of time, the house at Number 3 became first comfortable, then happy again; and thus do we find its occupants this July morning: Maria still in lavender but tolerably cheerful, Anne unmarried, nearly twenty-nine, hearty, merry, and looking forward (as no very great coincidence would have it) to dining at Celia Grypphon’s that night in company with Ensley.
    As to Ensley, Anne had come to accept that he wouldsomeday marry. She supposed herself reconciled to the eventuality. Indeed, as he postponed it from year to year, the prospect had aged and mellowed till (she quite believed) it had lost its sting. She understood his position; had he offered for her she would have reproached him for talking nonsense; anyway, the slightly vulgar former Miss Burnham having thus far produced no heir, Ensley’s wife must at the least be quite young, with a good many bearing years before her. An attribute, she needed no one to tell her, which no longer applied to Anne.
    The Garden Saloon was so called on account of its being hung all over with paper that convincingly depicted an ivy-covered trellis. It was a small sitting-room at the back of the house, in which the ladies generally passed together an hour or two of the earlier part of their day. They re-met there on this day more or less punctually, Maria with a basket, Anne with a book. The weather, now they were awake enough to see it, they perceived to be perfectly awful, hot without being sunny, close and hinting at rain without raining. “Too oppressive for exercise or errands,” they agreed, and throwing wide