Roxy Hastings — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ROXY HASTINGS. 133 negotiations to be opened with her parents for her return, and for the abandonment of the matrimonial engagement. “They are too much for me,” Lucy would reply. “You do not know my father. No, no, I will not go back. I know that I should be married ina week, and that step would be irrevocable.” Mary proved a stanch friend. She had determined faith- fully to aid Lucy to carry out her designs, unless she could be dissuaded from them by argument. “She is of age,” she said, “and has the right to decide upon and to control her own movements.” On steamer day she accompanied Lucy to meet her new friends on board the vessel, where they saw the whole of the Allard family for the first time. The pupils (two pug- noses and a chub) ranged from six to ten years, and seemed _ to be nice, well-behaved children, rather pretty in certain aspects. Mr. Allard was a slim man of forty-five, with the slightest sprinkling of gray in his full beard, and the lady, stoutish and sandy-haired, was probably about the same age. | The sons, for whom she had expressed so much solici- tude, were homely boys of eighteen and twenty—one a fop, the other a gawk; but both seemed struck with the charms of the new governess, and while.one stared rudely at her, the other annoyed her with small talk. Though Lucy could well imagine how diligently her father was seeking her, she did not think it at all probable that he would look for her on shipboard, and she began to feel as if the ocean’s width was already between them. But she was mistaken. What faint hope drew Mark Holden to the outgoing ship it would be difficult to say, but there he was, before Lucy’s eyes, on the wharf, in a surging crowd of people—there he was, elbowed by orange women and book peddlers, working his way with one tide and against another, toward the passage planks which led to the vessel. 7a Lucy turned pale, and gave up all for lost. Visions of herself scolded and frowned into mute submission, taken home in a carriage, falling back into the old routine—of the renewal of the wedding preparations—of the party, the ceremony, her dresses, her home in the Fifth avenue—all flashed through her mind in an instant as something real, certain, unavoidable. . But, gaining courage,.she reflected that it would require several minutes for her father to gain the deck, and with- © out other sign of perturbation than her pallor and a very EComicboo <S (E(0)