ns you prevented
them giving you the licence at once! It is not nice, my living on with
you like this!'

'But we are going to marry, dear!'

'Yes,' she murmured, and fell into reverie again. 'What a sudden resolve
it was of ours!' she continued. 'I wish I could get my father and
mother's consent to our marriage.... As we can't complete it for another
day or two, a letter might be sent to them and their answer received? I
have a mind to write.'

Pierston expressed his doubts of the wisdom of this course, which seemed
to make her desire it the more, and the result was a tiff between them.
'Since we are obliged to delay it, I won't marry without their consent!'
she cried at last passionately.

'Very well then, dear. Write,' he said.

When they were again indoors, she sat down to a note, but after a while
threw aside her pen despairingly. 'No: I cannot do it!' she said. 'I
can't bend my pride to such a job. Will YOU write for me, Jocelyn?'

'I? I don't see why I should be the one, particularly as I think it
premature.'

'But you have not quarrelled with my father as I have done.'

'Well no. But there is a long-standing antagonism, which would make it
odd in me to be the writer. Wait till we are married, and then I will
write. Not till then.'

'Then I suppose I must. You don't know my father. He might forgive me
marrying into any other family without his knowledge, but he thinks
yours such a mean one, and so resents the trade rivalry, that he would
never pardon till the day of his death my becoming a Pierston secretly.
I didn't see it at first.'

This remark caused an unpleasant jar on the mind of Pierston. Despite
his independent artistic position in London, he was staunch to the
simple old parent who had stubbornly held out for so many years against
Bencomb's encroaching trade, and whose money had educated and maintained
Jocelyn as an art-student in the best schools. So he begged her to say
no more about his mean family, and she silently resumed her letter,
giving an address at a post-office that their quarters might not be
discovered, at least just yet.

No reply came by return of post; but, rather ominously, some letters for
Marcia that had arrived at her father's since her departure were sent
on in silence to the address given. She opened them one by one, till
on reading the last, she exclaimed, 'Good gracious!' and burst into
laughter.

'What is it?' asked Pierston.

Marcia began to read the letter al