was by this time placid, greeted Price on the box familiarly, after his
wont, and asked him whom he was going to drive, as if he did not know,
cunning fellow; and actually went so far as to give Price one of those
cheap and nasty weeds, of which he kept a supply apart in his case for
such occasions of good fellowship.

So Mark waited to put the lady into the carriage, and he meditated
walking a little way by the window and making his peace, and there was
perhaps some vague vision of jumping in afterwards; I know not. Mark's
ideas of ladies and of propriety were low, and he was little better than
a sailor ashore, and not a good specimen of that class of monster.

He walked about the courtyard smoking, looking sometimes on the solemn
front of the old palatial mansion, and sometimes breathing a white film
up to the stars, impatient, like the enamoured Aladdin, watching in
ambuscade for the emergence of the Princess Badroulbadour. But honest
Mark forgot that young ladies do not always come out quite alone, and
jump unassisted into their vehicles. And in fact not only did Lord
Chelford assist the fair lady, cloaked and hooded, into the carriage, but
the vicar's goodhumoured little wife was handed in also, the good vicar
looking on, and as the gay good-night and leave-taking took place by the
door-steps, Mark drew back, like a guilty thing, in silence, and showed
no sign but the red top of his cigar, glowing like the eye of a Cyclops
in the dark; and away rolled the brougham, with the two ladies, and
Chelford and the vicar went in, and Mark hurled the stump of his cheroot
at Fortune, and delivered a fragmentary soliloquy through his teeth; and
so, in a sulk, without making his adieux, he marched off to his crib at
the Brandon Arms.