At which connection the
fashionable physician rubbed his hands with so much glee, that Jock
was the more glad not to have to hunt in couples with him.
The magnificent wedding-dress had been stopped by telegram, just as
it was packed for New York, and was despatched to Belforest. Mrs.
Wakefield undertook the task imposed upon her, and the wedding was to
be grand enough to challenge attention, and not be liable to the
accusation of being done in a corner. It might be called hasty, for
only a month would have passed since Elvira's arrival, before her
wedding-day; but this was by her own earnest wish. She made it no
secret that she should never cease to be nervous till she was Allen
Brownlow's wife, even though a letter to her cousins at River Hollow
had removed all fear of pursuit by Mrs. Gould; she seemed bent on
remaining at New York, and complained loudly of "the ungrateful
girl," whose personal belongings she retained by way of compensation.
It would have been too much to expect that Elvira should be a wise
and clever woman, but she had really learnt to be an affectionate
one, and in the school of adversity had parted with much of her
selfish petulance and arrogance. Allen, whose love had always been
blindly tender, more like a woman's or a parent's love than that of
an ordinary lover, was rapturous at the response he at last received.
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