At least let me manage everything.'

'Yes, yes. I wonder you didn't propose to take us before, Jack, and let
us have a good look at her.'

'I ought to have. You shall go on a King's night. You won't want me to
point her out, Bob; I have my reasons at present for asking it?'

'We'll be content with guessing,' said his brother.

When the gallant John was gone, Anne observed, 'Bob, how he is changed! I
watched him. He showed no feeling, even when you burst upon him suddenly
with the subject nearest his heart.'

'It must be because his suit don't fay,' said Captain Bob.

XXX. AT THE THEATRE ROYAL

In two or three days a message arrived asking them to attend at the
theatre on the coming evening, with the added request that they would
dress in their gayest clothes, to do justice to the places taken.
Accordingly, in the course of the afternoon they drove off, Bob having
clothed himself in a splendid suit, recently purchased as an attempt to
bring himself nearer to Anne's style when they appeared in public
together. As finished off by this dashing and really fashionable attire,
he was the perfection of a beau in the dog-days; pantaloons and boots of
the newest make; yards and yards of muslin wound round his neck, forming
a sort of asylum for the lower part of his face; two fancy waistcoats,
and coat-buttons like circular shaving glasses. The absurd extreme of
female fashion, which was to wear muslin dresses in January, was at this
time equalled by that of the men, who wore clothes enough in August to
melt them. Nobody would have guessed from Bob's presentation now that he
had ever been aloft on a dark night in the Atlantic, or knew the hundred
ingenuities that could be performed with a rope's end and a marline-spike
as well as his mother tongue.

It was a day of days. Anne wore her celebrated celestial blue pelisse,
her Leghorn hat, and her muslin dress with the waist under the arms; the
latter being decorated with excellent Honiton lace bought of the woman
who travelled from that place to Overcombe and its neighbourhood with a
basketful of her own manufacture, and a cushion on which she worked by
the wayside. John met the lovers at the inn outside the town, and after
stabling the horse they entered the town together, the trumpet-major
informing them that the watering-place had never been so full before,
that the Court, the Prince of Wales, and everybody of consequence was
there, and that an attic co