His Grace — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 | HIS GRACE. However that may be, the upshot of it all was that Nora and her modest belongings were deposited at Lavenham Road Station one fine evening and that she was able to bring with her an assurance of the consent, if not precisely the approval, of her betrothed. I should have been just as well pleased had she been provided with neither the one nor the other; but when I said something to that effect, she implored me, as a personal favor, to abstain from such remarks for the future. “Tt is all settled,” she declared, “and my having left Essex doesn’t alter anything. Lady Deverell chooses to make out that my having come to you is a sort of preliminary to jilting Mr. Burgess; but he doesn’t think so, and of course it isn’t so. No actual date has been fixed ; but I suppose, if I have another six months of spinsterhood before me, it’s about as much as [I have. Let us enjoy thosesix months together as much as we can, Phil. I’m afraid we shan’t enjoy them at all unless we can agree to put other people out of sight and out of mind.” It was doubtless impossible for either of us to carry out that compact to the letter ; but it was both possible and agreeable to avoid all mention of Mr. Burgess’s name, and I need scarcely say that I, for my part, had no sort of wish to mention the man. As for our en- joying ourselves together, I can answer for it that that part of the programme was faithfully executed by one of us, and I think I may add it was by the other also. We had, in fact, everything to make us happy. We had liberty, which, I take it, is almost the chief of earthly blessings; we had all the small luxuries be- longing to wealth, which are not to be despised; we Gomichboo cS (E(0) m