Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/188

178 lips on the irritation she had stored up against him. Guy Firminger went to Homburg; and if his confederate consented not to clip the slender thread by which this particular engagement still hung, she made very short work with every other. A dozen invitations, for Cowes, for the country, for Scotland, shimmered there before her, made a pathway of flowers, but she sent barbarous excuses. When her mother, aghast, said to her, "What, then, will you do?" she replied, in a very conclusive manner, "I'll go home!" Mrs. Gosselin was wise enough not to struggle; she saw that the thread was delicate, that it must dangle in quiet air. She therefore travelled back with her daughter to homely Hampshire, feeling that they were people of less importance than they had been for many a week. On the August afternoons they sat again on the little lawn on which Guy Firminger had found them the day he first became eloquent about the perils of the desirable young bachelor; and it was on this very spot that, towards the end of the month, and with some surprise, they beheld Mr.