s you;
we shall see you again before long," and then returned to Mrs. Davilow,
saying half cheerfully, half solemnly--

"Let us be thankful, Fanny. She is in a position well suited to her,
and beyond what I should have dared to hope for. And few women can have
been chosen more entirely for their own sake. You should feel yourself
a happy mother."

* * * * *

There was a railway journey of some fifty miles before the new husband
and wife reached the station near Ryelands. The sky had veiled itself
since the morning, and it was hardly more than twilight when they
entered the park-gates, but still Gwendolen, looking out of the
carriage-window as they drove rapidly along, could see the grand
outlines and the nearer beauties of the scene--the long winding drive
bordered with evergreens backed by huge gray stems: then the opening of
wide grassy spaces and undulations studded with dark clumps; till at
last came a wide level where the white house could be seen, with a
hanging wood for a back-ground, and the rising and sinking balustrade
of a terrace in front.

Gwendolen had been at her liveliest during the journey, chatting
incessantly, ignoring any change in their mutual position since
yesterday; and Grandcourt had been rather ecstatically quiescent, while
she turned his gentle seizure of her hand into a grasp of his hand by
both hers, with an increased vivacity as of a kitten that will not sit
quiet to be petted. She was really getting somewhat febrile in her
excitement; and now in this drive through the park her usual
susceptibility to changes of light and scenery helped to make her heart
palpitate newly. Was it at the novelty simply, or the almost incredible
fulfilment about to be given to her girlish dreams of being
"somebody"--walking through her own furlong of corridor and under her
own ceilings of an out-of-sight loftiness, where her own painted Spring
was shedding painted flowers, and her own fore-shortened Zephyrs were
blowing their trumpets over her; while her own servants, lackeys in
clothing but men in bulk and shape, were as nought in her presence, and
revered the propriety of her insolence to them:--being in short the
heroine of an admired play without the pains of art? Was it alone the
closeness of this fulfilment which made her heart flutter? or was it
some dim forecast, the insistent penetration of suppressed experience,
mixing the expectation of a triumph with the dread of