Dove always
sharing her room. "Miss" was treated with no small regard, as a lady
of the good old blood, and though the coachman and his wife talked
freely with her, they paid her all observance, never ate at the same
table, and provided assiduously for her comfort and pleasure. Once
they halted a whole day because even Mr. Dove was not proof against
the allurements of a bull-baiting, though he carefully explained
that he only made a concession to the grooms to prevent them from
getting discontented, and went himself to the spectacle to hinder
them from getting drunk, in which, be it observed, he did not succeed.
So much time was spent on thus creeping from stage to stage that
Aurelia had begun to feel as if the journey had been going on for ages,
and as if worlds divided her from her home, when on Sunday she timidly
preceded Mrs. Dove into Reading Abbey Church, and afterwards was shown
where rolled Father Thames. The travellers took early morning with
them for Maidenhead Thicket, and breakfasted on broiled trout at the
King's Arms at Maidenhead Bridge, while Aurelia felt her eye filled
with the beauty of the broad glassy river, and the wooded banks, and
then rose onwards, looking with loyal awe at majestic Windsor, where
the flag was flying. They slept at a poor little inn a Longford,
rather than cross Hounslow Heath in the evening, and there heard all
the last achievements of the thieves, so that Aurelia, in crossing the
next day, looked to see a masked highwayman start out of every bush;
but they came safely to the broad archway of the inn at Knightsbridge,
their last stage.
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