olite," she answered a little coldly.

Honeymoons, after all, are matters of conjecture, and what proportion of
them contain disenchantments will never be known. Honora lay awake for a
long time that night, and the poignant and ever recurring remembrance
of her husband's remark sent the blood to her face like a flame.
Would Peter, or George Hanbury, or any of the intimate friends of her
childhood have said such a thing?

A new and wistful feeling of loneliness was upon her. For some days,
with a certain sense of isolation and a tinge of envy which she
would not acknowledge, she had been watching a group of well-dressed,
clean-looking people galloping off on horseback or filling the
six-seated buckboards. They were from New York--that she had discovered;
and they did not mix with the others in the hotel. She had thought it
strange that Howard did not know them, but for a reason which she did
not analyze she hesitated to ask him who they were. They had rather
a rude manner of staring--especially the men--and the air of deriving
infinite amusement from that which went on about them. One of them, a
young man with a lisp who was addressed by the singular name of "Toots,"
she had overheard demanding as she passed: who the deuce was the tall
girl with the dark hair and the colour? Wherever she went, she was aware
of them. It was foolish, she knew, but their presence seemed--in the
magnitude which trifles are wont to assume in the night-watches--of late
to have poisoned her pleasure.

Enlightenment as to the identity of these disturbing persons came, the
next day, from an unexpected source. Indeed, from Mrs. Tyler. She loved
brides, she said, and Honora seemed to her such a sweet bride. It was
Mrs. Tyler's ambition to become thin (which was hitching her wagon to
a star with a vengeance), and she invited our heroine to share her
constitutional on the porch. Honora found the proceeding in the nature
of an ordeal, for Mrs. Tyler's legs were short, her frizzled hair very
blond, and the fact that it was natural made it seem, somehow, all the
more damning.

They had scarcely begun to walk before Honora, with a sense of dismay
of which she was ashamed, beheld some of the people who had occupied her
thoughts come out of the door and form a laughing group at the end
of the porch. She could not rid herself of the feeling that they were
laughing at her. She tried in vain to drive them from her mind, to
listen to Mrs. Tyler's account o