Marjorie.

After breakfast on Saturday morning, Mr. Bangs departed, riding his own
horse, while Rufus bestrode that of his late friend Nash. As the colonel
had no need for the services of Maguffin, that gentleman drove the
constable and his prisoner in a cart between these two mounted guards.
The clergymen went home to look over their sermons for the morrow, and
to make good resolutions for pastoral duty in the week to come, not that
either of them was disposed to be negligent in the discharge of such
duty, but a week of almost unavoidable arrears had to be overtaken. The
Squire was busy all day looking after his farm hands, and laying out
work to be commenced on Monday morning; and Mr. Terry went the rounds
with him. The colonel's time was spent largely in conversation, divided
between his dear Farquhar and his dearer Teresa. When not engaged in
helping the hostess and her sister in-law in the press of Saturday's
household work, the young ladies were in consultation over the new
engagement, the ring, the day, the bridesmaids, the trousseau, and other
like matters of great importance. Marjorie took her young cousins
botanizing in honour of Eugene, and crawfishing in memory of Mr.
Biggles; then she formed them into a Sunday school class, and instructed
them feelingly in the vanity of human wishes, and the fleeting nature of
all sublunary things. Even Timotheus could not be with Tryphosa as much
as he would have desired, and had to console himself with thoughts of
the morrow, and visions of two people in a ferny hollow singing hymns
out of one hymn-book. The glory seemed to have departed from Bridesdale,
the romance to have gone out of its existence on that humdrum Saturday.
The morning passed in drudgery, the dinner table in prosaic talk, and
the hot afternoon was a weariness of the flesh and spirit. Just about
tea time the mail waggon passed the gate; there was nobody in it for
Bridesdale. When the quiet tea was over, the veteran lit his pipe, and
he and Marjorie went to the post office to enquire for letters, and
invest some of Eugene's parting donations in candy. Half the mail bag
and more was for the Squire, the post-mistress said, and it made a large
bundle, so that she had to tie it up in a huge circus poster, which,
being a very religious woman, she had declined to tack up on the
post-office wall. "Marjorie," whispered Mr. Terry, so that the
post-mistress could not hear, "I wudn't buoy any swates now, for I
bela