Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/210

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THE VISITS

girl; she had dropped out of the world; she came up but once in five years. We had been together as very young creatures, and then we had married and gone our ways. It was arranged between us that after I should have paid a certain visit in August in the west of England I would take her—it would be very convenient, she was just over the Cornish border—on the way to my other engagements; I would work her in, as you say nowadays. She wanted immensely to show me her home, and she wanted still more to show me her girl, who had not come up to London, choosing instead, after much deliberation, to go abroad for a month with her brother and her brother's coach—he had been cramming for something—and Mrs. Coach of course. All that Mrs. Chantry had been able to show me in town was her husband, one of those country gentlemen with a moderate property and an old place, who are a part of the essence in their own neighborhood and not a part of anything anywhere else.

A couple of days before my visit to Chantry Court the people to whom I had