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Updated: May 26, 2025
He had accordingly written from Boston to ask if it would be agreeable to them that he should go with them through the Rockies. The proposal was most natural. The Delaines and Gaddesdens had been friends for many years, and Arthur Delaine enjoyed a special fame as a travelling companion easy, accomplished and well-informed. Nevertheless, he waited at Boston in some anxiety for Elizabeth's answer.
It had strengthened a stern and melancholy view of life, inclining him to turn away from personal joy, to an exclusive concern with public duties and responsibilities. And this whole temper had no doubt been increased by his perception of the Gaddesdens' place in English society.
It need only be added that he had a somewhat severe taste in music, and could render both Bach and Handel on the piano with success. His property was only some six miles distant from Martindale Park, the Gaddesdens' home.
But then he Delaine had never thought of Elizabeth Merton as the natural woman. There lay the disappointment. What was his own course to be? He believed himself defeated, but to show any angry consciousness of it would be to make life very uncomfortable in future, seeing that he and the Gaddesdens were inevitably neighbours and old friends. After all, he had not committed himself beyond repair.
There was in it not a jarring note, a ragged line age and dignity, wealth and undisputed place: Martindale expressed them all. The Gaddesdens had twice refused a peerage; and with contempt. In their belief, to be Mr. Gaddesden of Martindale was enough; a dukedom could not have bettered it. And the whole country-side in which they had been rooted for centuries agreed with them.
After lingering a while in the passage, she knocked, with an uncertain hand, and waited till Elizabeth came Elizabeth, hardly visible in the firelight, her brown hair falling like a veil round her face. A few days later the Gaddesdens were in town, settled in a house in Portman Square. Philip was increasingly ill, and moreover shrouded in a bitterness of spirit which wrung his mother's heart.
Elizabeth and Mariette came in from the garden, and a young cousin of the Gaddesdens, a Miss Lucas, slipped into the room under Elizabeth's wing. She was a pretty girl, dressed in an elaborate demi-toilette of white chiffon, and the younger men of the party in their shooting dress with Philip at their head were presently clustered thick about her, like bees after pollen.
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