These were actually tears which glittered in Miss Leonora’s eyes of fiery hazel grey—tears of very diminutive size, totally unlike the big dewdrops which rained from Miss Dora’s placid orbs and made them red, but did her no harm—but still a real moisture, forced out of a fountain which lay very deep down and inaccessible to ordinary efforts. They made her eyes look rather fiercer than otherwise for the moment; but they all but impeded Miss Leonora’s speech, and struck with the wildest consternation the entire party at the table, including even Lewis, who stood transfixed in the act of drawing a bottle of soda-water, and, letting the cork escape him in his amazement, brought affairs to an unlooked-for climax by hitting Miss Wentworth, who had been looking on with interest without taking any part in the proceedings. When the fright caused by this unintentional shot had subsided, Miss Leonora was found to have entirely recovered herself; but not so the Perpetual Curate, who had changed colour wonderfully, and no longer met his accuser with reciprocal disdain.
“My dear aunt,” said Frank Wentworth, “I wish you would not go back to that. I suppose we parsons are apt sometimes to exaggerate trifles into importance, as my father says. But, however, as things have turned out, I could not have left Carlingford,” the Curate added, in a tone of conciliation; “and now, when good fortune has come to me unsought—”
Miss Leonora finished her portion of chicken in one energetic gulp, and got up from the table. “Poetic justice!” she said, with a furious sneer. “I don’t believe in that kind of rubbish. As long as you were getting on quietly with your work I felt disposed to be rather proud of you, Frank. But I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way. When you succeed to the Rectory I suppose you will begin fighting, like the other man, with the new curate, for working in your parish?”
“When I succeed to the Rectory,” said Mr. Wentworth, getting up in his turn from the table, “I give you my word, aunt Leonora, no man shall work in my parish unless I set him to do it. Now I must be off to my work. I don’t suppose Carlingford Rectory will be the end of me,” the Perpetual Curate added, as he went away, with a smile which his aunts could not interpret. As for Miss Leonora, she tied her bonnet-strings very tight, and went off to the afternoon service at Salem Chapel by way of expressing her sentiments more forcibly. “I daresay he’s bold enough to take a bishopric,” she said to herself; “but fortunately we’ve got that in our own hands as long as Lord Shaftesbury lives;” and Miss Leonora smiled grimly over the prerogatives of her party. But though she went to the Salem Chapel that afternoon, and consoled herself that she could secure the bench of bishops from any audacious invasion of Frank Wentworth’s hopes, it is true, notwithstanding, that Miss Leonora sent her maid next morning to London with certain obsolete ornaments, of which, though the fashion was hideous, the jewels were precious; and Lucy Wodehouse had never seen anything so brilliant as the appearance they presented when they returned shortly after reposing upon beds of white satin in cases of velvet—“Ridiculous things,” as Miss Leonora informed her, “for a parson’s wife.”
It was some time after this—for, not to speak of ecclesiastical matters, a removal, even when the furniture is left behind and there are only books, and rare ferns, and old china, to convey from one house to another, is a matter which involves delays—when Mr. Wentworth went to the railway station with Mrs. Morgan to see her off finally, her husband having gone to London with the intention of joining her in the new house. Naturally, it was not without serious thoughts that the Rector’s wife left the place in which she had made the first beginning of her active life, not so successfully as she had hoped. She could not help recalling, as she went along the familiar road, the hopes so vivid as to be almost certainties with which she had come into Carlingford. The long waiting was then over, and the much-respected era had arrived and existence had seemed to be opening in all its fullness and strength before the two who had looked forward to it so long. It was not much more than six months ago; but Mrs. Morgan had made a great many discoveries in the meantime. She had found out the wonderful difference between anticipation and reality; and that life, even to a happy woman married after long patience to the man of her choice, was not the smooth road it looked, but a rough path enough cut into dangerous ruts, through which generations of men and women followed each other without ever being able to mend the way. She was not so sure as she used to be of a great many important matters which it is a wonderful consolation to be certain of—but, notwithstanding, had to go on as if she had no doubts, though the clouds of a defeat, in which, certainly, no honour, though a good deal of the prestige of inexperience had been lost, were still looming behind. She gave a little sigh as she shook Mr. Wentworth’s hand at parting. “A great many things have happened in six months,” she said—“one never could have anticipated so many changes in what looks so short a period of one’s life”—and as the train which she had watched so often rushed past that new bit of wall on which the Virginian creeper was beginning to grow luxuriantly, which screened the railway from the Rectory windows, there
