s needful.
Little Mrs. Copperhead, in dim neutral tints, looked like a little
shadow beside the pastor's buxom wife, and was frightened and ill at
ease and sad to the heart to lose her boy, who had been all she
possessed in the world. Sophy Dorset, specially asked for the purpose
with Ursula May, who was a bridesmaid, looked on with much admiration at
the curious people, so rich, so fine, and so overwhelming, among whom
her father had found it so remarkable to meet not one person whom he
knew. "Now, Ursula," she said, "if you had played your cards properly
that beautiful bridegroom and that nice little house in Mayfair, and the
privilege, perhaps, of writing M.P. after your name some time or other,
might all have been yours instead of Miss Beecham's. Why did you let her
carry off the prize?"

"Cousin Sophy!" cried Ursula indignantly. "As if I ever thought of him
as a prize! But I know you are only laughing at me. The strange thing is
that she likes him, though I am sure she knew very well that
Reginald--Oh, when one thinks how many people there are in this world
who do not get what they wish most--and how many people there are--"
Ursula paused, involved in her own antithesis, and Sophy ended it for
her with a sigh.

"Who do--and the one is no happier than the other, most times, little
Ursula; but you don't understand that, and as you are going to be one
of the blessed ones, you need not take to making reflections; that is my
privilege, my dear."

"Oh, Cousin Sophy, why were not you one of those blessed ones too?"
cried Ursula, clasping her arms suddenly round her kind friend. This, be
it understood, was after the breakfast was over, and when, in the deep
gloom which generally concludes a wedding day, everybody had gone home.
The two were in a magnificent large bedchamber in Portland Place, in the
vast silent mansion of the Copperheads, where at present there was
nothing more cheerful than the bridegroom's soft-eyed mother, taking
herself dreadfully to task for not being happy, and trying not to cry,
though there was to be a great dinner and entertainment that night.

"Don't you know?" said Sophy, putting her aside with a certain proud
coldness, and a momentary laugh, "he I loved proved false; that is to
say, in simple language, he turned out so poor a creature that it is
very good of me not to despise humanity for his sweet sake. Never mind.
If all had gone well, and he had been a real man instead of the sham
image