to the lips, but only to create a sickening satiety from which
the nauseated victim finally revolts in desperation. Then come yearnings
and weariness, loss of appetite, and consequent loss of temper; tears on
the one side, an oath or two on the other, and the "happy couple" come
home eventually very much wiser, as a rule, than they started, and
certainly in a position to understand several unpleasant truths
concerning each other of which they had not a suspicion before they went
away.

Now, if this is too often the melancholy finale to a wedding trip, even
with regard to persons who start forth on it full of hopes of happiness,
of faith in each other, and of fervent affection on both sides, how much
worse is not the case when there are small hopes of happiness, no faith
whatever on one side, and of affection none at all on the other?

This was how it was with Captain and Mrs. Maurice Kynaston on their six
weeks' wedding trip abroad. They went to a great many places they had
neither of them seen before. They stayed a week in Paris, where Helen
bought more dresses and declared herself supremely happy; they visited
the falls of the Rhine, which Maurice said deafened him; and ran
through Switzerland, which they both voted detestably uncomfortable and
dirty--the hotels, _bien entendu_, not the mountains. They stopped a
night on the St. Gothard, which was too cold for them, and a week or two
at the Italian lakes, which were too hot. They sauntered through the
picture-galleries of Milan and Turin, at which places Maurice's yawns
became prolonged and audible; and they floated through the canals of
Venice in gondolas, which Helen asserted to be more ragged and full of
fleas than any London four-wheeler. And then they turned homewards, and
by the time they neared the shores of the Channel once more they had had
so many quarrels that they had forgotten to count them, and they had both
privately discovered that matrimony is an egregious and, alas! an
irreparable mistake. Such a discovery was possibly inevitable; perhaps
they would have come in time to the same conclusion had they remained at
home, but they certainly found it out all the quicker for having gone
abroad.

Helen, perhaps, was the most to be pitied of the two. For Maurice there
had been no illusions to dispel, no dreams to be dissipated, no castles
built upon the sand to fall shattered into atoms; he had known very well
what he had to expect; he did not love the wife