Mrs Forrester’s surprise was equal to ours; and her sense of injury rather greater, because she had to feel for her Order, and saw more fully than we could do how such conduct brought stains on the aristocracy.

When she and Miss Pole left us we endeavoured to subside into calmness; but Miss Matty was really upset by the intelligence she had heard.  She reckoned it up, and it was more than fifteen years since she had heard of any of her acquaintance going to be married, with the one exception of Miss Jessie Brown; and, as she said, it gave her quite a shock, and made her feel as if she could not think what would happen next.

I don’t know whether it is a fancy of mine, or a real fact, but I have noticed that, just after the announcement of an engagement in any set, the unmarried ladies in that set flutter out in an unusual gaiety and newness of dress, as much as to say, in a tacit and unconscious manner, “We also are spinsters.”  Miss Matty and Miss Pole talked and thought more about bonnets, gowns, caps, and shawls, during the fortnight that succeeded this call, than I had known them do for years before.  But it might be the spring weather, for it was a warm and pleasant March; and merinoes and beavers, and woollen materials of all sorts were but ungracious receptacles of the bright sun’s glancing rays.  It had not been Lady Glenmire’s dress that had won Mr Hoggins’s heart, for she went about on her errands of kindness more shabby than ever.  Although in the hurried glimpses I caught of her at church or elsewhere she appeared rather to shun meeting any of her friends, her face seemed to have almost something of the flush of youth in it; her lips looked redder and more trembling full than in their old compressed state, and her eyes dwelt on all things with a lingering light, as if she was learning to love Cranford and its belongings.  Mr Hoggins looked broad and radiant, and creaked up the middle aisle at church in a brand-new pair of top-boots—­an audible, as well as visible, sign of his purposed change of state; for the tradition went, that the boots he had worn till now were the identical pair in which he first set out on his rounds in Cranford twenty-five years ago; only they had been new-pieced, high and low, top and bottom, heel and sole, black leather and brown leather, more times than any one could tell.

None of the ladies in Cranford chose to sanction the marriage by congratulating either of the parties.  We wished to ignore the whole affair until our liege lady, Mrs Jamieson, returned.  Till she came back to give us our cue, we felt that it would be better to consider the engagement in the same light as the Queen of Spain’s legs—­facts which certainly existed, but the less said about the better.  This restraint upon our tongues—­for you see if we did not speak about it to any of the parties concerned, how could we get answers to the questions that we longed to ask?—­was beginning to be irksome, and our idea of the dignity of silence