etc. etc. She fell in love (she was
not the first) with Jack's broad chest and thin waist; she thought his
whiskers as indeed they were, the handsomest pair in all His Majesty's
Brigade of Cuirassiers.
We know not what tears were shed in the vast and silent halls of
Chanticlere, when the company were gone, and the four cooks, and four
maids, six footmen, and temporary butler had driven back in their private
trap to the metropolis, which is not forty miles distant from that
splendid castle. How can we tell? The guests departed, the lodge-gates
shut; all is mystery:--darkness with one pair of wax candles blinking
dismally in a solitary chamber; all the rest dreary vistas of brown
hollands, rolled Turkey carpets, gaunt ancestors on the walls scowling
out of the twilight blank. The imagination is at liberty to depict his
lordship, with one candle, over his dreadful endless tapes and papers;
her ladyship with the other, and an old, old novel, wherein perhaps, Mrs.
Radcliffe describes a castle as dreary as her own; and poor little Clara
sighing and crying in the midst of these funereal splendours, as lonely
and heart-sick as Oriana in her moated grange:--poor little Clara!
Lord Kew's drag took the young men to London; his lordship driving, and
the servants sitting inside.
Pages:
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687