Page:Hopkinson Smith--armchair at the inn.djvu/354

 gayly, with a comprehensive wave of his hand as if he were arranging the stage setting—“something quite in keeping with the general sentiment; for certain it is that not since the days when fair ladies let themselves down from castle walls into the arms of their plumed knights, only to dash away into space on milk-white steeds, will there be anything quite so romantic as this child-wedding!”

“And so you mean to have a rope ladder, do you, and let my”

“Oh, no, madame la marquise,” he interrupted—“nothing so ordinary! We”—here he began rubbing his hands together quite as if he was ordering a dinner for an epicure—“we will have a revival of all the old customs just as they were in this very place. Our bride will join her lord in a cabriolet, and our groom will come on horseback—all fishermen ride, you know—and so will the other fishermen and maids—each gallant with a fair lady seated behind him on the crupper, her arms about his waist. Then we will have trumpeters and a garter man”

“A what!” She was still at sea as to his meaning, although she had not missed the tone of irony in his voice.