rs. Berry
inquired.

Adrian, very much amused, assured her that he was born and bred there.

"His father's Sir Austin?" wailed the black-satin bunch from behind her
handkerchief.

Adrian verified Richard's descent.

"Oh, then, what have I been and done!" she cried, and stared blankly at
her visitor. "I been and married my baby! I been and married the bread
out of my own mouth. O Mr. Harley! Mr. Harley! I knew you when you was a
boy that big, and wore jackets; and all of you. And it's my softness
that's my ruin, for I never can resist a man's asking. Look at that cake,
Mr. Harley!"

Adrian followed her directions quite coolly. "Wedding-cake, ma'am!" he
said.

"Bride-cake it is, Mr. Harley!"

"Did you make it yourself, ma'am?"

The quiet ease of the question overwhelmed Mrs. Berry and upset that
train of symbolic representations by which she was seeking to make him
guess the catastrophe and spare her the furnace of confession.

"I did not make it myself, Mr. Harley," she replied. "It's a bought cake,
and I'm a lost woman. Little I dreamed when I had him in my arms a baby
that I should some day be marrying him out of my own house! I little
dreamed that! Oh, why did he come to me! Don't you remember his old
nurse, when he was a baby in arms, that went away so sudden, and no fault
of hers, Mr. Harley! The very mornin' after the night you got into Mr.
Benson's cellar, and got so tipsy on his Madeary--I remember it as clear
as yesterday!--and Mr. Benson was that angry he threatened to use the
whip to you, and I helped put you to bed. I'm that very woman."

Adrian smiled placidly at these reminiscences of his guileless youthful
life.

"Well, ma'am! well?" he said. He would bring her to the furnace.

"Won't you see it all, kind sir?" Mrs. Berry appealed to him in pathetic
dumb show.

Doubtless by this time Adrian did see it all, and was mentally cursing at
Folly, and reckoning the immediate consequences, but he looked
uninstructed, his peculiar dimple-smile was undisturbed, his comfortable
full-bodied posture was the same. "Well, ma'am?" he spurred her on.

Mrs. Berry burst forth: "It were done this mornin', Mr. Harley, in the
church, at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty to, by licence."

Adrian was now obliged to comprehend a case of matrimony. "Oh!" he said,
like one who is as hard as facts, and as little to be moved: "Somebody
was married this morning; was it Mr. Thompson, or Mr. Feverel?"

Mrs. Be