The Toll-Gate Read Online Free

after candidate for this post did Fanny and her mama find, and cunningly throw in John's way. Apparently he liked them—all of them.
    This one was a most conversable girl, that one seemed to him a very lively girl, another a remarkably pretty girl. But he asked none of them to marry him. When his sister ventured to ask him once if he had ever been in love, he had replied quite seriously, Yes: he rather thought he had been desperately in love with the lodgekeeper's wife, who used to regale him with brandy-snaps, and allowed him to keep in a hutch outside her kitchen-door the ferrets Mama had so much disliked. Was that all? had demanded an exasperated sister. No, there had been a girl in Lisbon, when he first joined. Juanita, or was it Conchita? He couldn't remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw. Dark, of course, and with the biggest eyes, and such a well-turned ankle! Had he been in love with her? "Lord, yes!" replied John. "We all were!" He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama.
    "Well, I know, Mama," he said apologetically. "But the thing is I've got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don't really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don't mean to offer marriage to any girl who don't give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don't—any of 'em! And if one did," he added thoughtfully, "it's Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn't take to her!"
    "Dearest boy, I should take to any girl whom you loved!" declared Mrs. Staple.
    He grinned his appreciation of this mendacity, and gave her shoulders a hug, saying: "That was a whisker!"
    She boxed his ears. "Odious boy! The fact of the matter is that it is a thousand pities we are not living in archaic times. What you would have liked, my son, is to have rescued some female from a dragon, or an ogre!"
    "Famous good sport to have had a turn-up with a dragon," he agreed. "As long as you didn't find yourself with the girl left on your hands afterwards, which I've a strong notion those fellows did."
    "Such girls," his mother reminded him, "were always very beautiful."
    "To be sure they were! Dead bores too, depend upon it! In fact, I shouldn't be at all surprised if the dragons were very glad to be rid of 'em," said John.
    Not very promising, this. But Fanny had discovered Elizabeth Kelfield, and Mrs. Staple had acknowledged, after careful and critical study of Miss Kelfield, that here was a lady who might well take John's fancy.
    She was dark; she was decidedly handsome; her fortune was respectable; and although she was not quite twenty years of age she seemed older, the circumstance of her having taken from an invalid mother's shoulders the burden of household cares having given her an assurance beyond her years. Mrs. Staple thought she had quality, and began to cultivate the ailing Mrs. Kelfield.
    And now, when mother and daughter had been coaxed to Mildenhurst, off went John into Leicestershire, so that all the scheming so painstakingly undertaken on his behalf seemed likely to be wasted.
    In happy ignorance of this, Captain Staple, climbing the slopes of the Pennines, found himself in a wild, moorland country, and liked it.
    Having a good sense of direction, he had left the pike road at the earliest opportunity, and with it, in a very short space of time, all signs of civilisation. This exactly suited his mood, and he rode over the moors, at an easy pace and in a south-easterly direction. He had meant originally to have spent the night in Derby, but his late start made this impossible. Chesterfield became his objective. That was before the bay cast a shoe. When this happened, the Captain had ample time in which to regret having left the pike road, for he appeared to be in the centre of a vast desert. The only habitations to be seen for miles were an occasional cottage, and a few rough sheds dotted about the moors for the