CHAPTER LIX

Change and time take together their flight.--Golden Violet.

One evening in autumn, about three years after the date of our last
chapter, a stranger on horseback, in deep mourning, dismounted at the
door of the Golden Fleece, in the memorable town of W----. He walked
into the taproom, and asked for a private apartment and accommodation
for the night. The landlady, grown considerably plumper than when we
first made her acquaintance, just lifted up her eyes to the stranger's
face, and summoning a short stout man (formerly the waiter, now the
second helpmate of the comely hostess), desired him, in a tone which
partook somewhat more of the authority indicative of their former
relative situations than of the obedience which should have
characterized their present, "to show the gentleman to the Griffin,
No. 4."

The stranger smiled as the sound greeted his ears, and he followed not
so much the host as the hostess's spouse into the apartment thus
designated. A young lady, who some eight years ago little thought
that she should still be in a state of single blessedness, and who
always honoured with an attentive eye the stray travellers who, from
their youth, loneliness, or that ineffable air which usually
designates the unmarried man, might be in the same solitary state of
life, turned to the landlady and said,--

"Mother, did you observe what a handsome gentleman that was?"

"No," replied the landlady; "I only observed that he brought no
servant"