imploring and gesticulating like a madman, and Helen standing up and curtseying; and now for such a hurrah,"
A fresh mob rushed by. "Which is my lord's carriage—where is the young lady?"
"There, my good fellows. Lady Teviot is the lady in white."
"Why, you don't suppose," said Colonel Stuart, "they will go and take that estimable little hobgoblin, Lady Middlesex, for a bride?"
Another cheer, and, as the carriages moved slowly on, the murmur of comments on my lady's beauty and my lord's luck reached Lady Portmore's ears, and were encouraged by Lord Beaufort, who leaned out of the carriage and talked and laughed with the crowd, much to their mutual satisfaction. Lady Portmore waxed cross—wished she had known it would be such a mob, she would not have come; thought they had better wait a little, that the dust might subside; but no, on they went, the cheers becoming louder and the dust more opaque, and no vanquished king of the Huns, chained to the car of a Roman dictator, could feel his degradation more sensibly than Lady Portmore, following unnoticed in Helen's wake.
At last they arrived at the entrance of the bridge, and there stood the mayor and the magnates of the borough, with white staves in their hands and white ribbons in their button-holes, and white scarves over their shoulders; and Mrs. Mayoress, gorgeously arrayed, holding a bouquet to present to Lady Teviot; and the young mayors and mayoresses giggling at "the figure papa cut with a white shawl on," holding bouquets for the rest of the company.
The bridge was decked with flags, arches of laurel were thrown over it, and a barricade had been thrown across it to prevent any unhallowed foot from profaning the pavement till the proper moment. There was a dinner ready to be eaten at one end, and a balloon half ready to go up
