Page:Wiggin--Ladies-in-waiting.djvu/280

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LADIES-IN-WAITING



and chatted; Dorothea kissed Ellen Winthrop’s hand prettily, coquetted with Clive, and began to lay siege to the nurse’s heart, while she riveted the chains by which she held Marmaduke Hogg in bondage. She was in high spirits, but she was distinctly nervous, and whenever she introduced her fiancé to one of her fellow voyagers she showed a heightened color as she slid quickly over his surname.

Presently Clive withdrew a little distance to talk with the Governor’s secretary, and Dorothea caught the captain on his way from the ship and entangled him in a merry conversation with Miss Winthrop. This gave Marmaduke an opportunity to take me aside. I suspected that he wanted to confide in me that Mrs. Valentine had made one last determined refusal to receive him as a son-in-law, and that after the next few days of sea-voyaging we should meet an irate parent at the landing in New York and that there would be metaphorical “wigs on the green.”

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