“There it is,” cried Laura, joyfully.
“What?”
“The carriage. Yes, I am sure. Yes—he is coming. Let’s run on to the gate, Celia.”
They ran as fast as a brace of schoolgirls, and arrived at the gate in a flutter of excitement, just in time to see the neat little brougham turn into the avenue.
“Jack,” cried Laura.
“Stop,” cried Jack, with his head out of the window, and the coachman pulled up his horses, as his master jumped out of the carriage.
“Come out, Sampson,” said Mr. Treverton. “We’ll walk to the house with the ladies.”
He put his wife’s hand through his arm and walked on, leaving Celia to Mr. Sampson’s escort.
They had much to say to each other, husband and wife, in this happy meeting. John Treverton was in high spirits, full of delight at returning to his wife, full of triumph in the thought that no one could oust him from the home they both loved.
Tom Sampson walked in the rear with Miss Clare. She was dying to question him as to where he and his client had been, and what they had been doing, but felt that to do so would be bad manners, and knew that it would be useless. So she confined herself to general remarks of a polite nature.
“I hope you have had what the Yankees call a good time, Mr. Sampson,” she said.
“Very much so, thanks, Miss Clare,” answered Sampson, recalling a dinner eaten at Vefour’s just before leaving Paris on the previous evening. “The kewsine is really first-class.”
If there was one word Celia hated more than another it was this last odious adjective.
“You came by the four o’clock express from Waterloo, I suppose,” hazarded Celia.
“Yes, and a capital train it is!”
“Ah!” sighed Celia, “I wish I had a little more experience of trains. I stick in my native soil till I feel myself fast becoming a vegetable.”
“No fear of that,” exclaimed Mr. Sampson. “Such a girl as you—all life and spirit and cleverness—no fear of your ever assimilating to the vegetable tribe. There’s my poor sister Eliza, now, there’s a good deal of the vegetable about her. Her ideas run in such a narrow groove. I know before I go down to breakfast of a morning exactly what she’ll say to me, and I get to answer her mechanically. And at dinner again we sit opposite each other like a couple of talking automatons. It’s a dismal life, Miss Clare, for a man with any pretence to mind. If you only knew how I sometimes sigh for a more congenial companion!”
“But I don’t know anything about it, Mr. Sampson,” answered Celia, tartly. “How should I?”
“You might,” murmured Sampson, tenderly, “if you had as much sympathy with my ideas as I have with yours.”
“Nonsense!” cried Celia. “What sympathy can there be between you and me? We haven’t an idea in common. A business man like you, with his mind wholly occupied by leases and draft agreements and wills and writs and things, and a girl who doesn’t know an iota of law.”
“That’s just it!” exclaimed Sampson. “A man in my position wants a green spot in his life—a haven from the ocean of business—an o—what’s its name—in the barren desert of legal transactions. I want a home, Miss Clare—a home!”
“How can you say so, Mr. Sampson? I am sure you have a very comfortable house, and a model housekeeper in your sister.”
“A young woman may be too good a housekeeper, Miss Clare,” answered Sampson, seriously. “My sister is a little over-conscientious in her housekeeping. In her desire to keep down expenses she sometimes cuts things a little too fine. I don’t hold with waste or extravagance—I shudder at the thought of it—but I don’t like to be asked to eat rank salt butter on a Saturday morning because the regulation amount of fresh has run out, and Eliza won’t allow another half-pound to be had in till Saturday afternoon. That’s letting a virtue merge into a vice, Miss Clare.”
“Poor Miss Sampson. It is quite too good of her to study your purse so carefully.”
“So it is, Miss Clare,” answered the solicitor, doubtfully, “but I see ribbons round Eliza’s neck, and bonnets upon Eliza’s head, that I can’t always account for satisfactorily to myself. She has a little income of her own, as you no doubt know, since everybody knows everything at Hazlehurst, and she has made her little investments in cottage property out of her little income, which, as you may also know, is derived from cottage property, and she has added a cottage here and a cottage there, till she is swelling out into a little town, as you may say—well, I should think she must have five and twenty tenements in all—and I sometimes ask myself how she manages to invest so much of her little income, and yet to dress so smart. There isn’t a better dressed young lady in Hazlehurst—present company, of course, excepted—than my sister. You may have noticed the fact.”
“I have,” replied Celia, convulsed with inward laughter. “Her bonnets have been my admiration and my envy.”
“No, Miss Clare, not your envy,” protested Sampson, with exceeding tenderness. “You can envy no one. Perfection has no need to envy. It must feel its own superiority. But I was about to observe, in confidence, that I would rather the housekeeping money was spent on butter than on bonnets; and that when I feel myself deprived of any little luxury, it is a poor consolation to know that my self-denial will provide, Eliza with a neck ribbon. No, my dear Miss Clare, the hour must come when my sister will have to give up the keys of her cupboards at the Laurels, and retire to a home of her own. She is amply provided for. There will be no unkindness in such a severance. You know the old proverb, ‘Two is company, three is none.’ It doesn’t sound grammatical, but
