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He soon subdued it, however, and, fixing his eyes on the ground, listened to Eveline's detailed account of the visit, and her request "that Randal might be one of the invited witnesses to their fiancailles." The Constable paused for a moment, as if he were considering how to elude the solicitation.
Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day, just like that, without any warning to her friends, without a SOIREE DE CONTRAT or DINER DE FIANCAILLES or other appurtenances of a fashionable French wedding.
He stopped once to call her attention to a robin, the first they had seen that spring, and finally, when the sacred little place was in perfect order, came with a handful of trailing arbutus for her, and sat down beside her. "I thought I remembered seeing some of this on the bank," he said; "it's always grown there will you take it for your 'bouquet des fiancailles, Sylvia?
His nephew, on the contrary, resided almost constantly on the marches of Wales, occupied in settling by prudence, or subduing by main force, the various disturbances by which these provinces were continually agitated; and Eveline learned with surprise, that it was with difficulty his uncle had prevailed on him to be present at the ceremony of their being betrothed to each other, or, as the Normans entitled the ceremony, their fiancailles.
The chief notabilities of the province had assembled to do honour to the occasion, later on others would come, lesser lights by birth and position than this select crowd who would partake of the souper des fiançailles before the contrat was signed in their presence as witnesses to the transaction.
After much persuasion, Clitophon accedes to this arrangement, with the sole proviso that nothing but the fiançailles, or betrothal, shall take place in Egypt, and that the completion of the marriage shall be deferred till their arrival in Ephesus on the plea that he cannot pledge his faith to another in the land where his beloved Leucippe met with her fate.
But she comes, to answer for herself." Eveline entered at the moment, leaning on Rose's arm. She had laid aside mourning since the ceremony of the fiancailles, and was dressed in a kirtle of white, with an upper robe of pale blue. Her head was covered with a veil of white gauze, so thin, as to float about her like the misty cloud usually painted around the countenance of a seraph.
Just one endless string of questions to Victorine about the Marquis, with giggles over possibilities of their own fiançailles! It is so extraordinary that they can ever turn into witty, fascinating women like Héloise and the Marquise. Of course, these are just provincial nobodies, whom Héloise would not dream of knowing in Paris; perhaps the girls there are better.
"Methinks," replied the Abbess, with much coldness, "if this communication is meant for earnest, and it were no fit business I myself no fit person, for jesting with methinks the Constable's resolution should have been proclaimed to us yesterday before the fiancailles had united his troth with that of Eveline Berenger, under expectations very different from those which he now announces."
Randal shall attend at our fiancailles; there is indeed the more cause for his attendance, as I somewhat fear we may lack that of our valued nephew Damian, whose malady rather increases than declines, and, as I hear, with strange symptoms of unwonted disturbance of mind and starts of temper, to which the youth had not hitherto been subject."
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