d at the address! What
earthly good is it to match words against a man's passion? As it is, it
is, and no admonitions will alter it. However, all was over at last,
and we were in the vestry. Lucia could not write her name; she tried,
for no woman had less affectation and more self-command than she had,
but the tremulousness of the fingers would not be controlled, and the
mere effort agitated her so that she fell back in the chair, quivering,
till each point of lace in her dress shook, and every eye could see the
violent heart-beats under her bodice.

"Don't sign it, dearest!" I exclaimed, feeling like a murderer as I
looked into the blanched, nervous face, and widely-dilated eyes.

There was a blank pause for a moment of sympathy and apprehension, as
her shaking hand dropped the pen, and then the clergyman picked it up
and finished the half-written name. I felt a sharp self-reproach, and
Dick did not mend matters as he turned from her to me and said, in an
indignant mutter,--

"She is not in a fit state to be married at all, Victor!"

He looked at me as if I were committing a crime, and I coloured and
felt like a brute. Then there was the long breakfast, and the
reception, and, as I say, it seemed as if centuries were rolling over
my head in each five minutes, but now it was all done with; the burden
of other's society had slipped from us, and the weight of my own
oppression I seemed to have left, together with the sullen heat of town
air. In all the journey down Lucia had been recovering. The scarlet had
been coming back to her lips, and as the first breath of air came to
us, straight from the heart of the smiling, sun-lit valley, they parted
in a laugh, the light leapt up in the soft azure eyes, the rose-colour
under the skin, and she bent forward to me and said, impulsively,--

"Victor, if you want to know, I feel perfectly happy!"

"And I, too, you darling!" I said, smiling back into the brilliant face.

"It seems quite a new thing to feel. I don't ever remember feeling
happy until now, and I am five-and-twenty. Think, a whole third of an
ordinary lifetime passed before I have known it!"

I laughed.

"Well, you are going to begin now, at any-rate," I said.

"Yes; I think so," she answered, both the carmine lips still curved in
smiles. "But still it is late to begin. It is not wise; one should
begin at fifteen--ten years back."

"Begin what?" I said, laughing.

"To be happy."

"By all means," I answer