he
could only stammer out--"You consent then? I may go and tell her?"

"You may tell my girl--yes." He gave a vague laugh and added: "One way
or another, my wife always gets what she wants."

VII

MR. NEWELL'S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In
the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as bringing
together the father and daughter, and hovering in an attitude of
benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did not very
distinctly figure.

But Mr. Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing
through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the
meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any
kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the
appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be left
alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett conveyed
it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of understanding. As
for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the nuptial preparations
to give her husband another thought. She had gained her point, she had
disarmed her foes, and in the first flush of success she had no time to
remember by what means her victory had been won. Even Garnett's
services received little recognition, unless he found them sufficiently
compensated by the new look in Hermione's eyes.

The principal figures in Mrs. Newell's foreground were the Woolsey
Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly
consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the importance
of her close connection with an "aristocratic marriage," and dazzled by
the Baron's familiarity with the intricacies of the Almanach de Gotha.
In his society and Mrs. Newell's, Mrs. Hubbard evidently felt that she
had penetrated to the sacred precincts where "the right thing"
flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione, her look of happiness
had returned, but with an undertint of melancholy, visible perhaps only
to Garnett, but to him always hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank
back into her passive self, resigned to serve as the brilliant
lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell hung the trophies of conquest.
Preparations for the wedding were zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew
the danger of giving people time to think things over, and her fears
about her husband being allayed, she began to [87] dread a new attempt
at evasion on the part of the bridegroom's family.

"The soon