Discoursing thus by the way, and resisting the farmer’s occasional efforts to relieve him of the bag, with the observation that appearances were deceiving, and that he intended, please his Maker, to live and turn over a little more interest yet, Anthony brought them to Mrs. Wicklow’s house.  Mrs. Wicklow promised to put them into the track of the omnibuses running toward Dahlia’s abode in the Southwest, and Mary Ann Wicklow, who had a burning desire in her bosom to behold even the outside shell of her friend’s new grandeur, undertook very disinterestedly to accompany them.  Anthony’s strict injunction held them due at a lamp-post outside Boyne’s Bank, at half-past three o’clock in the afternoon.

“My love to Dahly,” he said.  “She was always a head and shoulders over my size.  Tell her, when she rolls by in her carriage, not to mind me.  I got my own notions of value.  And if that Mr. Ayrton of hers ’ll bank at Boyne’s, I’ll behave to him like a customer.  This here’s the girl for my money.”  He touched Rhoda’s arm, and so disappeared.

The farmer chided her for her cold manner to her uncle, murmuring aside to her:  “You heard what he said.”  Rhoda was frozen with her heart’s expectation, and insensible to hints or reproof.  The people who entered the omnibus seemed to her stale phantoms bearing a likeness to every one she had known, save to her beloved whom she was about to meet, after long separation.

She marvelled pityingly at the sort of madness which kept the streets so lively for no reasonable purpose.  When she was on her feet again, she felt for the first time, that she was nearing the sister for whom she hungered, and the sensation beset her that she had landed in a foreign country.  Mary Ann Wicklow chattered all the while to the general ear.  It was her pride to be the discoverer of Dahlia’s terrace.

“Not for worlds would she enter the house,” she said, in a general tone; she knowing better than to present herself where downright entreaty did not invite her.

Rhoda left her to count the numbers along the terrace-walk, and stood out in the road that her heart might select Dahlia’s habitation from the other hueless residences.  She fixed upon one, but she was wrong, and her heart sank.  The fair Mary Ann fought her and beat her by means of a careful reckoning, as she remarked,—­

“I keep my eyes open; Number 15 is the corner house, the bow-window, to a certainty.”

Gardens were in front of the houses; or, to speak more correctly, strips of garden walks.  A cab was drawn up close by the shrub-covered iron gate leading up to No. 15.  Mary Ann hurried them on, declaring that they might be too late even now at a couple of dozen paces distant, seeing that London cabs, crawlers as they usually were, could, when required, and paid for it, do their business like lightning.  Her observation was illustrated the moment after they had left her in the rear; for a gentleman suddenly sprang across the pavement, jumped into a cab, and was whirled away, with as much apparent magic to provincial eyes, as if a pantomimic trick had been performed.  Rhoda pressed forward a step in advance of her father.