“My mission has been accomplished with the most signal success, I flatter myself: and now I hope your difficulties are ended, my dear Mrs. Coverdale; Celeste and I have found _all_ the trunks. Fortunately, my brougham is here, and I need scarcely add, entirely at your service.” Seeing she hesitated, he continued, “Don’t be alarmed about the proprieties, I have been too well drilled in such matters by my sisters to intrude where I am not wanted.” “Really your lordship is most kind,” exclaimed Alice, all her scruples vanishing before his good-nature and consideration. And there being nothing for it but to take his arm (relinquished somewhat hastily by Celeste when she discovered that it was a _Milor Anglais_ with whom she had made so free) and allow him to put her into the well-appointed brougham, Alice did so with an interesting succession of smiles and blushes which made her look most dangerously pretty. Thereupon the two hundred guinea horse, which was so thoroughly stuffed with oats that it might almost as well have been a corn-bin, and which, being an animal of the highest breeding, had evinced such an amount of disgust and terror at the hissing, snorting, whistling, and other low habits of the steam dragon, that nothing but the strongest sense of propriety and a very severe curb-bit could have kept it from running away, stood on its hind legs like a Christian, vindicated its transcendentalism by salaaming like a Turk ere it resumed its quadrupedal attitude, and finally set off, at about the rate of fifteen miles an hour, with its head and tail as erect as if some invisible giant were attempting to lift it up by them. CHAPTER XXXI.--SPIDERS AND FLIES. “My dear Kate, I think your cousin, Mrs. Coverdale, has just driven up; and yet I don’t know. Is it likely, or, as I may say, probable, that she should arrive in a brougham?” “With a high-stepping horse, and a coronet on the panels?--scarcely, I should imagine.” The speakers were Mr. Crane, who had grown rather less like a scaffold-pole since we last were favoured with his society, and Horace D’Almayne, who appeared quite himself and quite at home. Attracted by their remarks, Kate joined her husband at the window. “It can’t be them,” she said, “there is no luggage;” but, as if to contradict her remark, at the moment she ceased to speak a cab dashed into Park Lane with a _fair_ amount of imperials, cap-cases, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, and other female travelling _miscellania_, and drew up behind the brougham. As it stopped, a tall, handsome young man sprang out, and opening the door of the brougham, offered his arm to Alice, and conducted her up the steps most carefully. “Why, that surely cannot be Mr. Coverdale; or, at least, if I may be permitted to say so, he has become singularly thin and--and youthful-looking, if it is,” bleated Mr. Crane. “No, that is not Harry Coverdale,” returned Kate, wonderingly, “nor do I see anything of him either!”