“Well, then we had better be off for Aspendale, and not keep Verdon waiting for breakfast,” cried Augustine, backing his horse up to the hedge to turn his head round on the narrow road. “How good you are to come all this way for me!” said Mabel. “And so Mr. Verdon has really arrived, and the balloon, is it all right—all ready?” “It will be ready by the time that our guests arrive,” replied her uncle, lightly shaking the rein, and touching his steed with the whip, “Have you leave to ascend with us, Mabel?” “Yes; Papa’s leave, at least,” she replied. “Oh! how delightful it is to go driving on at this pace; but it will be far more delightful still to go scudding aloft before the breeze!” “Is not that Bardon’s cottage?” asked Augustine, as they dashed past a little tenement. Mabel gave an affirmative reply. “I had had some thought,” observed her uncle, “of calling for Dr. Bardon; but I confess that, after what has past, I feel somewhat disgusted at his coming at all. There is a singular want of good taste in his showing himself at this time to Dashleigh.” “Surely the doctor is not going in the balloon!” exclaimed Mabel. “No, no, not quite so bad as that,” answered Augustine with a smile; “I could not undertake to carry up lion and bear in one car, even with my fair niece to help me to keep the peace between them.” “But do you believe,” asked Mabel, “that the earl will really ascend?” Augustine’s handsome countenance became grave. “He must do something, poor fellow,” he observed, “to efface from the minds of men the remembrance of that mischievous squib.” “But if he be really so timid—” “Reginald has no want of courage,” said Augustine Aumerle, with unusual warmth in his manner; “I have seen him plunge into a rapid stream to save a drowning child; and when we were boys together, I have known him fight a bully who was twice as strong as himself. Certainly he never could climb a tree,” added the friend in a more thoughtful tone. “And he played a poor figure on the mountain, according to ‘The Precipice and the Peer,’” said Mabel. “There was a great deal of exaggeration in that piece; any one could see that,” replied Augustine. “It contained the very essence of malicious satire. I don’t know what could have possessed the countess to write it.” “Pride, I suppose,” answered Mabel. “Detestable pride!” muttered her uncle. “But do you not think that they will be one day reconciled to each other? Annabella has so much that is noble in her; she is so generous and affectionate,—and you seem to have a good opinion of the earl.” “The mischief is,” replied Augustine, “that he is as proud as she. No, I fear that neither will ever yield, and that this grievous separation will last as long as their lives.”