Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/343

Rh. She rose and ascended the stairs to her bedroom, which was now, fortunately, ready for her.

This room did not command the street. It looked out at the mews, and beyond the mews at a row of brick houses, seen above the wall enclosing the back premises. In the mews yard were some carriages being washed, and grooms with their braces discharged from their right shoulders, brushing and combing their horses. Over the stables were the windows of the dwellings of the cabdrivers and their wives, and of the ostlers; and there were sickly attempts at flower gardening in some of them. Out of others hung articles of clothing to be aired or dried. A multitude of dingy sparrows hopped about in the yard, and also a considerable and apparently inexhaustible number of equally dingy children.

Beyond the wall of the backyard of a house in the row was a gaunt Lombardy poplar, trunk and branches sable as the stalks of maidenhair fern. What a pretty view had been that which Arminell had commanded from her bedroom window at Orleigh! The sweeps of green turf in the park, the stately trees, the cedars, and the copper beech, and the silver birch! How the birds had sung in the morning about her window! How sweet had been the incense of the wisteria trusses of lilac flowers entering at the open casement!

What would her father say at her departure? Into what a predicament had she put him? She had forced him into one from which he could not escape without publishing his own dishonour, without allowing his wife, and the parish, and the county, and society generally to know that once on a time he had behaved in a manner unworthy of a gentleman to a poor servant girl. He to whom every one in the place, in the county, looked up as a spotless and worthy John Bull, was to be proclaimed an impostor, and made the talk of idle and malicious tongues.