They could be married ever so quietly--in London--where no curious eyes could watch, no gossiping tongues criticise--married--made for ever one; and then away to mountain and lake, to Pallanza, Lugano, Bellaggio, to flowery shores betwixt hill and water, to a life lovelier than his fairest dreams. No man journeying with a passionate heart ever found rail or boat quick enough, and Geoffrey, always impatient, chafed at every stage of the journey, and complained as bitterly as if he had been travelling at the expensive crawl in which a Horace Walpole or a Beckford was content to accomplish that restricted round which our ancestors called the "grand tour." Nothing slower than a balloon driving before a gale would have satisfied Geoffrey's eager soul. And he would rather have accepted balloon transit, with all its hazards, and run the risk of being landed in a Carinthian valley or a Norwegian fjord, than endure the harassing delay at dusty railway stations, or the slowness of the channel boat. He telegraphed to his mother from Brussels, and again from Dover; so there was a cart waiting for him at the station with one of the fastest horses in the stable, but, unfortunately, one of the stupidest grooms, who could furnish him with no information upon any subject. Was all well at home? His mistress well? The groom believed so. "Was Miss Vincent well?" The groom had heard nothing to the contrary; but he had not seen Miss Vincent lately. No particular inference was to be drawn from this statement of the groom's, since Suzette's visits were not made to the stableyard. There was no one at Discombe to do stable-parade and to insist upon horses being stripped and trotted up and down for the edification of a visitor whose utmost knowledge of a horse might be that it is a beast with four legs--mane and tail understood, though not always existent. Geoffrey rattled his old hunter along at a pace that made the cart sway like an outrigger in the wake of a steamer, and he alighted at the Manor House at least a quarter of an hour before a reasonable being would have got himself there. It was late in the evening, and his mother was sitting alone in the dimly lighted music-room. The piano was shut--a bad sign; for when Suzette was there the piano was hardly ever idle. "Well, mother dear, so glad to be home again," said Geoffrey, with an affectionate hug, but with eyes that were looking over his mother's head into space for another presence, even while he gave her that filial embrace. "And I am so glad to have you, Geoffrey; and I hope now this restless spirit will be content to stay." "_C'est selon._ Where's Suzette?" "At Bournemouth, with an old school-fellow." "Why didn't you wire her address, and then I could have gone straight to her?" "My dear Geoffrey, what are you thinking of?" "Of Suzette--of my dear love--of my wife that is to be!"