en, about
Easter, Mrs. Cricklander decided she would come down and bring a few
friends. It was with a sudden violent beating of the heart that Halcyone
learned casually from Mr. Carlyon that John Derringham would be of their
number.

The aunts took in the _Morning Post_, but until she was eighteen they
had rigorously forbidden Halcyone's perusal of it. Newspapers, except
one or two periodicals, were not fit for young ladies' reading until
they were grown up, they felt. However, their niece, having now come to
years of discretion, sometimes had the pleasure of reading John
Derringham's speeches and thrilled with joy over his felicitous daring
and caustic wit. The Government could not last much longer, but he at
least, as far as he could, would keep it full of vigor until the end.
She knew, therefore, that the last sitting before the Easter recess had
been a storm of words sharp as sword-thrusts--it was before the days of
the language of Billingsgate and the behavior of roughs. There were
quite a number of gentlemen still in the House of Commons, who often
behaved as such.

Those wonderful forces which Halcyone culled from all nature, and
especially the night, gave her a serenity over the most moving events,
and when the sudden beating of her heart was over, she waited calmly for
the moment when she should see John Derringham again.

Mr. Carlyon took in the _Graphic_ as well as his _Quarterly Review_ and
the _Nineteenth Century_, and it was her only medium for guessing even
what the outside world looked like, but from it she was quite aware that
a beard was a most unusual thing for a young modern man of the world,
and that John Derringham for that reason must always be distinguished
from his fellows. Carpenters and hedgers and ditchers wore them, and
nondescript young fellows she remembered seeing when she went into
Upminster with her aunts; but these excursions had been discontinued now
for the past five years, so the villagers of Sarthe-under-Crum and the
denizens of the rather larger Applewood were the only human beings she
ever saw.

The party at Wendover were to arrive on the Thursday before Good
Friday--Priscilla had told her that--and it was just possible that some
of them might be in church.

The aunts now drove a low basket shay which had been their pride in the
sixties, but which for countless years, until the investment began to
pay, they had been unable to keep a pair of ponies for. Now, however,
the sh