Mrs. Penniman started for church; but before she had arrived, she
stopped and turned back, and before twenty minutes had elapsed she
re-entered the house, looked into the empty parlours, and then went
upstairs and knocked at Catherine's door. She got no answer;
Catherine was not in her room, and Mrs. Penniman presently
ascertained that she was not in the house. "She has gone to him, she
has fled!" Lavinia cried, clasping her hands with admiration and
envy. But she soon perceived that Catherine had taken nothing with
her--all her personal property in her room was intact--and then she
jumped at the hypothesis that the girl had gone forth, not in
tenderness, but in resentment. "She has followed him to his own
door--she has burst upon him in his own apartment!" It was in these
terms that Mrs. Penniman depicted to herself her niece's errand,
which, viewed in this light, gratified her sense of the picturesque
only a shade less strongly than the idea of a clandestine marriage.
To visit one's lover, with tears and reproaches, at his own
residence, was an image so agreeable to Mrs. Penniman's mind that she
felt a sort of aesthetic disappointment at its lacking, in this case,
the harmonious accompaniments of darkness and storm. A quiet Sunday
afternoon appeared an inadequate setting for it; and, indeed, Mrs.
Penniman was quite out of humour with the conditions of the time,
which passed very slowly as she sat in the front parlour in her
bonnet and her cashmere shawl, awaiting Catherine's return.
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