.

CHAPTER XIV.

HER WEDDING DRESS.

Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings--
High instincts before which our moral nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Wordsworth.

"Vera, are you not coming to look at it?"

"Presently."

"It is all laid out on your bed, and you ought to try it on; it might
want alterations."

"Oh, there is plenty of time!"

"It is downright affectation!" says old Mrs. Daintree, angrily, to her
daughter-in-law, as she and Marion leave the room together; "no girl can
really be indifferent to a wedding dress covered with yards of lovely
Brussels lace flounces; she ought to be ashamed of herself for her
ingratitude to Lady Kynaston for such a present; she must really want
to see it, only she likes playing the fine lady beforehand!"

"I don't think it is that," says Marion, gently; "I don't believe Vera is
well."

"Fiddlesticks!" snorts her mother-in-law. "A woman who is going to marry
ten thousand a year within ten days is bound to be well."

Vera sits alone; she leans her head against the window, her hands lie
idle in her lap, her eyes mechanically follow the rough, gray clouds that
rack across the winter sky. In little more than a week she will be Vera
Nevill no longer; she will have gained all that she desired and tried
for--wealth, position, Kynaston--and Sir John! She should be well
content, seeing that it has been her own doing all along. No one has
forced or persuaded her into this engagement, no one has urged her on to
a course contrary to her own inclination, or her own judgment. It has
been her own act throughout. And yet, as she sits alone in the twilight,
and counts over on her fingers the few short days that intervene between
to-day and her bridal morning, hot miserable tears rise to her eyes,
and fall slowly down, one by one, upon her clasped hands. She does not
ask herself why she weeps; possibly she dares not. Only her thoughts
somehow--by that strange connection of ideas which links something in
our present to some other thing in our past, and which apparently is in
no way dependent upon it--go back instinctively, as it were, to her dead
sister, the Princess Marinari.

"Oh, my poor darling Theodora!" she murmurs, half aloud; "if you had
lived, you would have taken care of your Vera; if you had not died, I
should never have come here, nor ever ha