have fancied Mr. Hoggins?  I am not
surprised that Mr. Hoggins has liked her."

"Oh! I don't know. Mr. Hoggins is rich,
and very pleasant looking," said Miss Matey,
"and very good-tempered and kind-hearted."

"She has married for an establishment,
that's it. I suppose she takes the surgery
with it," said Miss Pole, with a little dry
laugh at her own joke. But, like many people
who think they have made a severe and
sarcastic speech, which yet is clever of its
kind, she began to relax in her grimness from
the moment when she made this allusion to
the surgery; and we turned to speculate on
the way in which Mrs. Jamieson would receive
the news. The person whom she had left in
charge of her house to keep off followers from
her maids, to set up a follower of her own!
And that follower a man whom Mrs. Jamieson
had tabooed as vulgar, and inadmissible to
Cranford society; not merely on account of
his name, but because of his voice, his
complexion, his boots, smelling of the stable, and
himself, smelling of drugs. Had he ever
been to see Lady Glenmire at Mrs. Jamieson's?
Chloride of lime would not purify the house in
its owner's estimation if he had. Or had their
interviews been confined to the occasional
meetings in the chamber of the poor sick
conjuror, to whom, with all our sense of the
mésalliance, we could not help allowing that
they had both been exceedingly kind? And
now it turned out that a servant of Mrs.
Jamieson's had been ill, and Mr. Hoggins had
been attending her for some weeks. So the
wolf had got into the fold, and now he was
carrying off the shepherdess. What would
Mrs. Jamieson say? We looked into the
darkness of futurity as a child gazes after a
rocket up in the cloudy sky, full of wondering
expectation of the rattle, the discharge, and
the brilliant shower of sparks and light. Then
we brought ourselves down to earth and the
present time, by questioning each other
(being all equally ignorant, and all equally
without the slightest data to build any
conclusions upon) as to when IT would take
place? Where? How much a year Mr.
Hoggins had? Whether she would drop her
title? And how Martha and the other
correct servants in Cranford would ever be
brought to announce a married couple as
Lady Glenmire and Mr. Hoggins? But would
they be visited? Would Mrs. Jamieson let
us? Or must we choose between the Honourable
Mrs. Jamieson and the degraded Lady
Glenmire. We all liked Lady Glenmire the
best. She was bright, and kind, and sociable,
and agreeable; and Mrs. Jamieson was dull,
and inert, and pompous, and tiresome. But
we had acknowledged the sway of the latter
so long, that it seemed like a kind of
disloyalty now even to meditate disobedience to
the prohibition we anticipated.

Mrs. Forrester surprised us in our darned
caps and patched collars; and we forgot all
about them in our eagerness to see how she
would bear the information, which we honourably
left to Miss Pole to impart, although, if
we had been inclined to take unfair advantage
we might have rushed in ourselves, for
she had a most out-of-place fit of coughing
for five minutes after Mrs. Forrester entered
the room. I shall never forget the imploring
expression of her eyes, as she looked at us
over her pocket-handkerchief. They said as
plain as words could speak, " Don't let Nature
deprive me of the treasure which is mine,
although for a time I can make no use of it."
And we did not. 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 Matey 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 if 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 Matey
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 seemed 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 bran-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.