Chapter 3

Who is the young lady? And how did she find her way into The Glen
Tower?

Her name (in relation to which I shall have something more to say a
little further on) is Jessie Yelverton. She is an orphan and an only
child. Her mother died while she was an infant; her father was my dear
and valued friend, Major Yelverton. He lived long enough to celebrate
his darling’s seventh birthday. When he died he intrusted his authority
over her and his responsibility toward her to his brother and to me.

When I was summoned to the reading of the major’s will, I knew
perfectly well that I should hear myself appointed guardian and
executor with his brother; and I had been also made acquainted with my
lost friend’s wishes as to his daughter’s education, and with his
intentions as to the disposal of all his property in her favor. My own
idea, therefore, was, that the reading of the will would inform me of
nothing which I had not known in the testator’s lifetime. When the day
came for hearing it, however, I found that I had been over hasty in
arriving at this conclusion. Toward the end of the document there was a
clause inserted which took me entirely by surprise.

After providing for the education of Miss Yelverton under the direction
of her guardians, and for her residence, under ordinary circumstances,
with the major’s sister, Lady Westwick, the clause concluded by
saddling the child’s future inheritance with this curious condition:

From the period of her leaving school to the period of her reaching the
age of twenty-one years, Miss Yelverton was to pass not less than six
consecutive weeks out of every year under the roof of one of her two
guardians. During the lives of both of them, it was left to her own
choice to say which of the two she would prefer to live with. In all
other respects the condition was imperative. If she forfeited it,
excepting, of course, the case of the deaths of both her guardians, she
was only to have a life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it, the
money itself was to become her own possession on the day when she
completed her twenty-first year.

This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by surprise.
I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed her
sister-in-law’s death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she had
afterward watched over the welfare of the little motherless child—I
remembered the innumerable claims she had established in this way on
her brother’s confidence in her affection for his orphan daughter, and
I was, therefore, naturally amazed at the appearance of a condition in
his will which seemed to show a positive distrust of Lady Westwick’s
undivided influence over the character and conduct of her niece.

A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a
little after-consideration of some of my deceased friend’s
peculiarities of disposition and feeling, to which I had not hitherto
attached sufficient importance, were enough to make me understand the
motives by which he had been influenced in providing for the future of
his child.

Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and
eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small farmer,
and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance, never to be
ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of society to
influence his own settled opinions on social questions in general.

Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on such
principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to say, held
some strangely heterodox opinions on the modern education of girls, and
on the evil influence of society over the characters of women in
general. Out of the strength of those opinions, and out of the
certainty of his conviction that his sister did not share them, had
grown that condition in his will which removed his daughter from the
influence of her aunt for six consecutive weeks in every year. Lady
Westwick was the most light-hearted, the most generous, the most
impulsive of women; capable, when any serious occasion called it forth,
of all that was devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and
ordinary times, constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for
perpetual gayety. Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his
daughter would lead under her aunt’s roof, and at the same time
gratefully remembering his sister’s affectionate devotion toward his
dying wife and her helpless infant, Major Yelverton had attempted to
make a compromise, which, while it allowed Lady Westwick the close
domestic intercourse with her niece that she had earned by innumerable
kind offices, should, at the same time, place the young girl for a
fixed period of every year of her minority under the corrective care of
two such quiet old-fashioned guardians as his brother and myself. Such
is the history of the clause in the will. My friend little thought,
when he dictated it, of the extraordinary result to which it was one
day to lead.

For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little Jessie
was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions to the
mistress to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable young lady.
Although she was reported to be anything but a pattern pupil in respect
of attention to her lessons, she became from the first the chosen
favorite of every one about her. The very offenses which she committed
against the discipline of the school were of the sort which provoke a
smile even on the stern countenance of authority itself. One of these
quaint freaks of mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here,
inasmuch as it gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be
found to appear occasionally in these pages.

On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation, the
mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door of the
bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was then close on
midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden illness might have
happened, she hastened into the room. On opening the door, she
discovered, to her horror and amazement, that all four girls were out
of bed—were dressed in brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the
four grotesque “Queens” of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs,
familiar to us all on the pack of cards—and were dancing a quadrille,
in which Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The
next morning’s investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had smuggled
the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by giving an
impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of an
entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a
“court-card” quadrille at her aunt’s country house.

The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary punishment
promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie’s extraordinary
outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to become one of the
traditions of the school, and she and her sister-culprits were
thenceforth hailed as the “queens” of the four “suites” by their
class-companions whenever the mistress’s back was turned, Whatever
might have become of the nicknames thus employed in relation to the
other three girls, such a mock title as The Queen of Hearts was too
appropriately descriptive of the natural charm of Jessie’s character,
as well as of the adventure in which she had taken the lead, not to
rise naturally to the lips of every one who knew her. It followed her
to her aunt’s house—it came to be as habitually and familiarly
connected with her, among her friends of all ages, as if it had been
formally inscribed on her baptismal register; and it has stolen its way
into these pages because it falls from my pen naturally and inevitably,
exactly as it often falls from my lips in real life.

When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself—in other
words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of the will. At
that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower, and her living six
weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum society was, as she
herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of the question. Fortunately,
she had always got on well with her uncle and his family; so she
exerted her liberty of choice, and, much to her own relief and to mine
also, passed her regular six weeks of probation, year after year, under
Mr. Richard Yelverton’s roof.

During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my
fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his
military duties allowed him the opportunity, contrived to see her, now
at her aunt’s house, and now at Mr. Yelverton’s. The particulars of her
character and conduct, which I gleaned in this way, more than sufficed
to convince me that the poor major’s plan for the careful training of
his daughter’s disposition, though plausible enough in theory, was
little better than a total failure in practice. Miss Jessie, to use the
expressive common phrase, took after her aunt. She was as generous, as
impulsive, as light-hearted, as fond of change, and gayety, and fine
clothes—in short, as complete and genuine a woman as Lady Westwick
herself. It was impossible to reform the “Queen of Hearts,” and equally
impossible not to love her. Such, in few words, was my
fellow-guardian’s report of his experience of our handsome young ward.

So the time passed till the year came of which I am now writing—the
ever-memorable year, to England, of the Russian war. It happened that I
had heard less than usual at this period, and indeed for many months
before it, of Jessie and her proceedings. My son had been ordered out
with his regiment to the Crimea in 1854, and had other work in hand now
than recording the sayings and doings of a young lady. Mr. Richard
Yelverton, who had been hitherto used to write to me with tolerable
regularity, seemed now, for some reason that I could not conjecture, to
have forgotten my existence. Ultimately I was reminded of my ward by
one of George’s own letters, in which he asked for news of her; and I
wrote at once to Mr. Yelverton. The answer that reached me was written
by his wife: he was dangerously ill. The next letter that came informed
me of his death. This happened early in the spring of the year 1855.

I am ashamed to confess it, but the change in my own position was the
first idea that crossed my mind when I read the news of Mr. Yelverton’s
death. I was now left sole guardian, and Jessie Yelverton wanted a year
still of coming of age.

By the next day’s post I wrote to her about the altered state of the
relations between us. She was then on the Continent with her aunt,
having gone abroad at the very beginning of the year. Consequently, so
far as eighteen hundred and fifty-five was concerned, the condition
exacted by the will yet remained to be performed. She had still six
weeks to pass—her last six weeks, seeing that she was now twenty years
old—under the roof of one of her guardians, and I was now the only
guardian left.

In due course of time I received my answer, written on rose-colored
paper, and expressed throughout in a tone of light, easy, feminine
banter, which amused me in spite of myself. Miss Jessie, according to
her own account, was hesitating, on receipt of my letter, between two
alternatives—the one, of allowing herself to be buried six weeks in The
Glen Tower; the other, of breaking the condition, giving up the money,
and remaining magnanimously contented with nothing but a life-interest
in her father’s property. At present she inclined decidedly toward
giving up the money and escaping the clutches of “the three horrid old
men;” but she would let me know again if she happened to change her
mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to remain always
affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of my reach.

The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her again.
Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have made me feel
a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time from the Crimea
that my son was wounded—not dangerously, thank God, but still severely
enough to be laid up—and all my anxieties were now centered in that
direction. By the beginning of September, however, I got better
accounts of him, and my mind was made easy enough to let me think of
Jessie again. Just as I was considering the necessity of writing once
more to my refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had
returned at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind, suddenly
grown sick of society, suddenly become enamored of the pleasures of
retirement, and suddenly found out that the three horrid old men were
three dear old men, and that six weeks’ solitude at The Glen Tower was
the luxury, of all others, that she languished for most. As a necessary
result of this altered state of things, she would therefore now propose
to spend her allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly
expect her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the
greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the lowest
possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ashes along with
her.

The first ordeal to which this alarming letter forced me to submit was
the breaking of the news it contained to my two brothers. The
disclosure affected them very differently. Poor dear Owen merely turned
pale, lifted his weak, thin hands in a panic-stricken manner, and then
sat staring at me in speechless and motionless bewilderment. Morgan
stood up straight before me, plunged both his hands into his pockets,
burst suddenly into the harshest laugh I ever heard from his lips, and
told me, with an air of triumph, that it was exactly what he expected.

“What you expected?” I repeated, in astonishment.

“Yes,” returned Morgan, with his bitterest emphasis. “It doesn’t
surprise me in the least. It’s the way things go in this world—it’s the
regular moral see-saw of good and evil—the old story with the old end
to it. They were too happy in the garden of Eden—down comes the serpent
and turns them out. Solomon was too wise—down comes the Queen of Sheba,
and makes a fool of him. We’ve been too comfortable at The Glen
Tower—down comes a woman, and sets us all three by the ears together.
All I wonder at is that it hasn’t happened before.” With those words
Morgan resignedly took out his pipe, put on his old felt hat and turned
to the door.

“You’re not going away before she comes?” exclaimed Owen, piteously.
“Don’t leave us—please don’t leave us!”

“Going!” cried Morgan, with great contempt. “What should I gain by
that? When destiny has found a man out, and heated his gridiron for
him, he has nothing left to do, that I know of, but to get up and sit
on it.”

I opened my lips to protest against the implied comparison between a
young lady and a hot gridiron, but, before I could speak, Morgan was
gone.

“Well,” I said to Owen, “we must make the best of it. We must brush up
our manners, and set the house tidy, and amuse her as well as we can.
The difficulty is where to put her; and, when that is settled, the next
puzzle will be, what to order in to make her comfortable. It’s a hard
thing, brother, to say what will or what will not please a young lady’s
taste.”

Owen looked absently at me, in greater bewilderment than ever—opened
his eyes in perplexed consideration—repeated to himself slowly the word
“tastes”—and then helped me with this suggestion:

“Hadn’t we better begin, Griffith, by getting her a plum-cake?”

“My dear Owen,” I remonstrated, “it is a grown young woman who is
coming to see us, not a little girl from school.”

“Oh!” said Owen, more confused than before. “Yes—I see; we couldn’t do
wrong, I suppose—could we?—if we got her a little dog, and a lot of new
gowns.”

There was, evidently, no more help in the way of advice to be expected
from Owen than from Morgan himself. As I came to that conclusion, I saw
through the window our old housekeeper on her way, with her basket, to
the kitchen-garden, and left the room to ascertain if she could assist
us.

To my great dismay, the housekeeper took even a more gloomy view than
Morgan of the approaching event. When I had explained all the
circumstances to her, she carefully put down her basket, crossed her
arms, and said to me in slow, deliberate, mysterious tones:

“You want my advice about what’s to be done with this young woman?
Well, sir, here’s my advice: Don’t you trouble your head about her. It
won’t be no use. Mind, I tell you, it won’t be no use.”

“What do you mean?”

“You look at this place, sir—it’s more like a prison than a house,
isn’t it? You, look at us as lives in it. We’ve got (saving your
presence) a foot apiece in our graves, haven’t we? When you was young
yourself, sir, what would you have done if they had shut you up for six
weeks in such a place as this, among your grandfathers and
grandmothers, with their feet in the grave?”

“I really can’t say.”

“I can, sir. You’d have run away. _She’ll_ run away. Don’t you worry
your head about her—she’ll save you the trouble. I tell you again,
she’ll run away.”

With those ominous words the housekeeper took up her basket, sighed
heavily, and left me.

I sat down under a tree quite helpless. Here was the whole
responsibility shifted upon my miserable shoulders. Not a lady in the
neighborhood to whom I could apply for assistance, and the nearest shop
eight miles distant from us. The toughest case I ever had to conduct,
when I was at the Bar, was plain sailing compared with the difficulty
of receiving our fair guest.

It was absolutely necessary, however, to decide at once where she was
to sleep. All the rooms in the tower were of stone—dark, gloomy, and
cold even in the summer-time. Impossible to put her in any one of them.
The only other alternative was to lodge her in the little modern
lean-to, which I have already described as being tacked on to the side
of the old building. It contained three cottage-rooms, and they might
be made barely habitable for a young lady. But then those rooms were
occupied by Morgan. His books were in one, his bed was in another, his
pipes and general lumber were in the third. Could I expect him, after
the sour similitudes he had used in reference to our expected visitor,
to turn out of his habitation and disarrange all his habits for her
convenience? The bare idea of proposing the thing to him seemed
ridiculous; and yet inexorable necessity left me no choice but to make
the hopeless experiment. I walked back to the tower hastily and
desperately, to face the worst that might happen before my courage
cooled altogether.

On crossing the threshold of the hall door I was stopped, to my great
amazement, by a procession of three of the farm-servants, followed by
Morgan, all walking after each other, in Indian file, toward the spiral
staircase that led to the top of the tower. The first of the servants
carried the materials for making a fire; the second bore an inverted
arm-chair on his head; the third tottered under a heavy load of books;
while Morgan came last, with his canister of tobacco in his hand, his
dressing-gown over his shoulders, and his whole collection of pipes
hugged up together in a bundle under his arm.

“What on earth does this mean?” I inquired.

“It means taking Time by the forelock,” answered Morgan, looking at me
with a smile of sour satisfaction. “I’ve got the start of your young
woman, Griffith, and I’m making the most of it.”

“But where, in Heaven’s name, are you going?” I asked, as the head man
of the procession disappeared with his firing up the staircase.

“How high is this tower?” retorted Morgan.

“Seven stories, to be sure,” I replied.

“Very good,” said my eccentric brother, setting his foot on the first
stair, “I’m going up to the seventh.”

“You can’t,” I shouted.

“_She_ can’t, you mean,” said Morgan, “and that’s exactly why I’m going
there.”

“But the room is not furnished.”

“It’s out of her reach.”

“One of the windows has fallen to pieces.”

“It’s out of her reach.”

“There’s a crow’s nest in the corner.”

“It’s out of her reach.”

By the time this unanswerable argument had attained its third
repetition, Morgan, in his turn, had disappeared up the winding stairs.
I knew him too well to attempt any further protest.

Here was my first difficulty smoothed away most unexpectedly; for here
were the rooms in the lean-to placed by their owner’s free act and deed
at my disposal. I wrote on the spot to the one upholsterer of our
distant county town to come immediately and survey the premises, and
sent off a mounted messenger with the letter. This done, and the
necessary order also dispatched to the carpenter and glazier to set
them at work on Morgan’s sky-parlor in the seventh story, I began to
feel, for the first time, as if my scattered wits were coming back to
me. By the time the evening had closed in I had hit on no less than
three excellent ideas, all providing for the future comfort and
amusement of our fair guest. The first idea was to get her a Welsh
pony; the second was to hire a piano from the county town; the third
was to send for a boxful of novels from London. I must confess I
thought these projects for pleasing her very happily conceived, and
Owen agreed with me. Morgan, as usual, took the opposite view. He said
she would yawn over the novels, turn up her nose at the piano, and
fracture her skull with the pony. As for the housekeeper, she stuck to
her text as stoutly in the evening as she had stuck to it in the
morning. “Pianner or no pianner, story-book or no story-book, pony or
no pony, you mark my words, sir—that young woman will run away.”

Such were the housekeeper’s parting words when she wished me
good-night.

When the next morning came, and brought with it that terrible waking
time which sets a man’s hopes and projects before him, the great as
well as the small, stripped bare of every illusion, it is not to be
concealed that I felt less sanguine of our success in entertaining the
coming guest. So far as external preparations were concerned, there
seemed, indeed, but little to improve; but apart from these, what had
we to offer, in ourselves and our society, to attract her? There lay
the knotty point of the question, and there the grand difficulty of
finding an answer.

I fall into serious reflection while I am dressing on the pursuits and
occupations with which we three brothers have been accustomed, for
years past, to beguile the time. Are they at all likely, in the case of
any one of us, to interest or amuse her?

My chief occupation, to begin with the youngest, consists, in acting as
steward on Owen’s property. The routine of my duties has never lost its
sober attraction to my tastes, for it has always employed me in
watching the best interests of my brother, and of my son also, who is
one day to be his heir. But can I expect our fair guest to sympathize
with such family concerns as these? Clearly not.

Morgan’s pursuit comes next in order of review—a pursuit of a far more
ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my second brother’s
whimsical, self-contradictory character to view with the profoundest
contempt the learned profession by which he gained his livelihood, and
he is now occupying the long leisure hours of his old age in composing
a voluminous treatise, intended, one of these days, to eject the whole
body corporate of doctors from the position which they have usurped in
the estimation of their fellow-creatures. This daring work is entitled
“An Examination of the Claims of Medicine on the Gratitude of Mankind.
Decided in the Negative by a Retired Physician.” So far as I can tell,
the book is likely to extend to the dimensions of an Encyclopedia; for
it is Morgan’s plan to treat his comprehensive subject principally from
the historical point of view, and to run down all the doctors of
antiquity, one after another, in regular succession, from the first of
the tribe. When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels
of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his
successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which a
modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest? Once again,
clearly not.

Owen’s favorite employment is, in its way, quite as characteristic as
Morgan’s, and it has the great additional advantage of appealing to a
much larger variety of tastes. My eldest brother—great at drawing and
painting when he was a lad, always interested in artists and their
works in after life—has resumed, in his declining years, the holiday
occupation of his schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he
works with more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out
more brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than any
artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met with. In look,
in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of mankind, Owen, by some
singular anomaly in his character, which he seems to have caught from
Morgan, glories placidly in the wildest and most frightful range of
subjects which his art is capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins,
in howling wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;
thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees on
the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves, and
whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an intervening
glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the succession of pictorial
horrors. When I see him at his easel, so neat and quiet, so
unpretending and modest in himself, with such a composed expression on
his attentive face, with such a weak white hand to guide such bold, big
brushes, and when I look at the frightful canvasful of terrors which he
is serenely aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every
successive touch, I find it difficult to realize the connection between
my brother and his work, though I see them before me not six inches
apart. Will this quaint spectacle possess any humorous attractions for
Miss Jessie? Perhaps it may. There is some slight chance that Owen’s
employment will be lucky enough to interest her.

Thus far my morning cogitations advance doubtfully enough, but they
altogether fail in carrying me beyond the narrow circle of The Glen
Tower. I try hard, in our visitor’s interest, to look into the
resources of the little world around us, and I find my efforts rewarded
by the prospect of a total blank.

Is there any presentable living soul in the neighborhood whom we can
invite to meet her? Not one. There are, as I have already said, no
country seats near us; and society in the county town has long since
learned to regard us as three misanthropes, strongly suspected, from
our monastic way of life and our dismal black costume, of being popish
priests in disguise. In other parts of England the clergyman of the
parish might help us out of our difficulty; but here in South Wales,
and in this latter half of the nineteenth century, we have the old type
parson of the days of Fielding still in a state of perfect
preservation. Our local clergyman receives a stipend which is too
paltry to bear comparison with the wages of an ordinary mechanic. In
dress, manners, and tastes he is about on a level with the upper class
of agricultural laborer. When attempts have been made by well-meaning
gentlefolks to recognize the claims of his profession by asking him to
their houses, he has been known, on more than one occasion, to leave
his plowman’s pair of shoes in the hall, and enter the drawing-room
respectfully in his stockings. Where he preaches, miles and miles away
from us and from the poor cottage in which he lives, if he sees any of
the company in the squire’s pew yawn or fidget in their places, he
takes it as a hint that they are tired of listening, and closes his
sermon instantly at the end of the sentence. Can we ask this most
irreverend and unclerical of men to meet a young lady? I doubt, even if
we made the attempt, whether we should succeed, by fair means, in
getting him beyond the servants’ hall.

Dismissing, therefore, all idea of inviting visitors to entertain our
guest, and feeling, at the same time, more than doubtful of her chance
of discovering any attraction in the sober society of the inmates of
the house, I finish my dressing and go down to breakfast, secretly
veering round to the housekeeper’s opinion that Miss Jessie will really
bring matters to an abrupt conclusion by running away. I find Morgan as
bitterly resigned to his destiny as ever, and Owen so affectionately
anxious to make himself of some use, and so lamentably ignorant of how
to begin, that I am driven to disembarrass myself of him at the outset
by a stratagem.

I suggest to him that our visitor is sure to be interested in pictures,
and that it would be a pretty attention, on his part, to paint her a
landscape to hang up in her room. Owen brightens directly, informs me
in his softest tones that he is then at work on the Earthquake at
Lisbon, and inquires whether I think she would like that subject. I
preserve my gravity sufficiently to answer in the affirmative, and my
brother retires meekly to his studio, to depict the engulfing of a city
and the destruction of a population. Morgan withdraws in his turn to
the top of the tower, threatening, when our guest comes, to draw all
his meals up to his new residence by means of a basket and string. I am
left alone for an hour, and then the upholsterer arrives from the
county town.

This worthy man, on being informed of our emergency, sees his way,
apparently, to a good stroke of business, and thereupon wins my lasting
gratitude by taking, in opposition to every one else, a bright and
hopeful view of existing circumstances.

“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he says, confidentially, when I show him the
rooms in the lean-to, “but this is a matter of experience. I’m a family
man myself, with grown-up daughters of my own, and the natures of young
women are well known to me. Make their rooms comfortable, and you make
’em happy. Surround their lives, sir, with a suitable atmosphere of
furniture, and you never hear a word of complaint drop from their lips.
Now, with regard to these rooms, for example, sir—you put a neat French
bedstead in that corner, with curtains conformable—say a tasty chintz;
you put on that bedstead what I will term a sufficiency of bedding; and
you top up with a sweet little eider-down quilt, as light as roses, and
similar the same in color. You do that, and what follows? You please
her eye when she lies down at night, and you please her eye when she
gets up in the morning—and you’re all right so far, and so is she. I
will not dwell, sir, on the toilet-table, nor will I seek to detain you
about the glass to show her figure, and the other glass to show her
face, because I have the articles in stock, and will be myself
answerable for their effect on a lady’s mind and person.”

He led the way into the next room as he spoke, and arranged its future
fittings, and decorations, as he had already planned out the bedroom,
with the strictest reference to the connection which experience had
shown him to exist between comfortable furniture and female happiness.

Thus far, in my helpless state of mind, the man’s confidence had
impressed me in spite of myself, and I had listened to him in
superstitious silence. But as he continued to rise, by regular
gradations, from one climax of upholstery to another, warning visions
of his bill disclosed themselves in the remote background of the scene
of luxury and magnificence which my friend was conjuring up. Certain
sharp professional instincts of bygone times resumed their influence
over me; I began to start doubts and ask questions; and as a necessary
consequence the interview between us soon assumed something like a
practical form.

Having ascertained what the probable expense of furnishing would amount
to and having discovered that the process of transforming the lean-to
(allowing for the time required to procure certain articles of rarity
from Bristol) would occupy nearly a fortnight, I dismissed the
upholsterer with the understanding that I should take a day or two for
consideration, and let him know the result. It was then the fifth of
September, and our Queen of Hearts was to arrive on the twentieth. The
work, therefore, if it was begun on the seventh or eighth, would be
begun in time.

In making all my calculations with a reference to the twentieth of
September, I relied implicitly, it will be observed, on a young lady’s
punctuality in keeping an appointment which she had herself made. I can
only account for such extraordinary simplicity on my part on the
supposition that my wits had become sadly rusted by long seclusion from
society. Whether it was referable to this cause or not, my innocent
trustfulness was at any rate destined to be practically rebuked before
long in the most surprising manner. Little did I suspect, when I parted
from the upholsterer on the fifth of the month, what the tenth of the
month had in store for me.

On the seventh I made up my mind to have the bedroom furnished at once,
and to postpone the question of the sitting-room for a few days longer.
Having dispatched the necessary order to that effect, I next wrote to
hire the piano and to order the box of novels. This done, I
congratulated myself on the forward state of the preparations, and sat
down to repose in the atmosphere of my own happy delusions.

On the ninth the wagon arrived with the furniture, and the men set to
work on the bedroom. From this moment Morgan retired definitely to the
top of the tower, and Owen became too nervous to lay the necessary
amount of paint on the Earthquake at Lisbon.

On the tenth the work was proceeding bravely. Toward noon Owen and I
strolled to the door to enjoy the fine autumn sunshine. We were sitting
lazily on our favorite bench in front of the tower when we were
startled by a shout from above us. Looking up directly, we saw Morgan
half in and half out of his narrow window. In the seventh story,
gesticulating violently with the stem of his long meerschaum pipe in
the direction of the road below us.

We gazed eagerly in the quarter thus indicated, but our low position
prevented us for some time from seeing anything. At last we both
discerned an old yellow post-chaise distinctly and indisputably
approaching us.

Owen and I looked at one another in panic-stricken silence. It was
coming to us—and what did it contain? Do pianos travel in chaises? Are
boxes of novels conveyed to their destination by a postilion? We
expected the piano and expected the novels, but nothing
else—unquestionably nothing else.

The chaise took the turn in the road, passed through the gateless gap
in our rough inclosure-wall of loose stone, and rapidly approached us.
A bonnet appeared at the window and a hand gayly waved a white
handkerchief.

Powers of caprice, confusion, and dismay! It was Jessie Yelverton
herself—arriving, without a word of warning, exactly ten days before
her time.