In half an hour they would be at his father’s vicarage in Horningsham. It had been a most pleasant drive. Breakfasting early, they had left London at seven o’clock, and it was now approaching five of the evening (he would be ready to adjust his watch, for Warminster time was a half-hour or so behind London’s). They had stopped but once, except to change horses, and then for the briefest of meals, and they had talked for every mile of the way.Hervey had racked his brain but could think of no likely cause for his mother’s alarm. In the end he had concluded that very likely it was another fit of the vapours, occasioned no doubt by some dispute of his father’s with the bishop (he remembered well enough the tumult of ‘popery in Horningsham’ before he went to India). But if his mother wrote to him, she was by her own reckoning in need of him, and he could do no other but come at once, although there was pressing business in London – and perhaps even more in Hertfordshire. The compensation was, of course, that he would see his daughter.
