“I must manage to get along as well as I can,” he thought, but she shall not suffer. Laura, my dearest, I thought you had run away!” he exclaimed, as she jumped lightly out of the carriage with her beaming face, and caught his smile of welcome.
“Where do you think I have been, Lewis?”
“To half a hundred places.”
“Well, so I have,” she laughed. “But I meant only one of those places. Ah, you’ll never guess. I have been to our old home, Cedar Lodge. I had been paying visits on the Rise, and as I drove back the thought came over me that I would go in to the old house and look at it. The woman in charge did not know me; she took me for a lady really wanting the house. It’s the servant they engaged after I left home, I found; she is to stop in it until the house is let. It is in apple-pie order; all the old tables and chairs in their places, and a few new ones put in to freshen the rooms up. Only fancy, Lewis! the woman gave me a card with the Earl of Oakburn’s town address upon it, and said I could write there, or apply here to Mr. Fisher, the agent, whichever was most agreeable to me.”
Laura laughed merrily as she spoke. She had turned into the dining-room with Mr. Carlton, and was untying the white strings of her bonnet. He was smiling also, and there was nothing in his countenance to betray aught of the checkmate, the real vexation recently brought to him; few faces betrayed emotion, whether of joy or pain, less than the impassive one of Mr. Carlton.
“I wonder the earl should attempt to let the house furnished,” he remarked. “I have wondered so ever since I saw the board up, advertising it.”
“Papa took it on a long lease,” said Laura. “I suppose he could not give it up if he would. Lewis, what else do you think I have done?—accepted an impromptu invitation to go out to-night.”
“Where?”
“To that cross old Mrs. Newberry’s. But she has her nieces staying with her, the most charming girls, and I promised to go up after dinner. Half-a-dozen people are to be there, all invited in the same impromptu manner, and we are going to act charades. Will you come?”
“I will take you, and come for you in the evening. But I have patients to see to-night, that will absorb an hour or two.”
Laura scarcely heard the answer. She had lost none of her vanity, and she eagerly made her way to her dressing-room, her head full of what her attire for the evening should be.
Throwing her bonnet, which she had carried upon her arm by its strings, on the sofa, slipping her shawl from her shoulders, Laura opened her drawers and wardrobe, and turned over dresses and gay attire. She was all excitement. Loving gaiety much, any little unexpected accession to it put her almost in a fever.
“I’ll wear this pearl-grey silk,” she decided at length. “It will be quite sufficient mourning if we manage to put a bit of black ribbon on the point-lace sleeves. Sarah must contrive it somehow. Where are they?”
The “where are they” applied to the sleeves just mentioned. A pair of really beautiful sleeves that had belonged to Mrs. Chesney. Laura pulled open a drawer where her laces and fine muslins were kept, and turned its contents over with her white and nimble fingers.
“Now what has Sarah done with them?” she exclaimed, as the sleeves did not appear to show themselves. “She is as careless as she can be. If those sleeves are lost———”
Laura broke off her words and flew to the bell, ringing it so sharply that it echoed through the house. Laura had inherited her father’s impatient temper, and the girl flew up; she knew that her mistress brooked no delay in having her demands attended to. This girl had been engaged as housemaid, but her mistress kept her pretty well employed about her own person. She entered the room to see drawers open, dresses and laces scattered about in confusion, and their owner watching for her in some excitement.
“Where are my point-lace sleeves?”
“Point-lace sleeves, my lady” repeated Sarah, some doubt in her accent, as if she scarcely understood which were the point-lace sleeves. At least that was how Lady Laura interpreted the tone.
“Those beautiful sleeves of real point, that were mamma’s,” explained Laura, angrily and impatiently. “I told you how valuable they were; I ordered you to be always particularly careful in tacking them into my dresses. Now you know.”
“Yes, I remember, my lady,” replied Sarah.
“They are in the drawer.”
“They are not in the drawer.”
“But they must be, my lady,” persisted the girl, somewhat pertly, for she had as sharp a temper as her mistress, “I never put the laces by in any place but that.”
“Find them, then,” retorted Laura.
The maid advanced to the drawer, and began taking up one thing after another in it, slowly and carefully; too slowly for the impatience of Lady Laura.
“Stand aside, Sarah, you won’t have finished