ged: why worry about it now?"

"You are a strange girl. I am sorry you are going to marry my brother. I
do not believe you will be at all happy, but, as I have said already, I
have expressed my opinion."

"The marriage is to take place quite quietly three weeks from now," said
Florence. "We have arranged everything. We are not going to have an
ordinary wedding. I shall be married in my travelling-dress. Tom says he
can barely spend a week away from his editorial work, and he wants me to
live in a flat with him at first."

"Oh, those flats are so detestable," said Edith; "no air, and you are
crushed into such a tiny space; but I suppose Tom will sacrifice
everything to the sitting-rooms."

"He means to have a salon: he wants to get all the great and witty and
wise around us. It ought to be an interesting future," said Florence in
a dreary tone.

Edith gazed at her again.

"Well," she said, after a pause, "I suppose great talent like yours does
content one. You certainly are marvellously brilliant. I read your last
story, and thought it the cleverest of the three. But I wish you were
not so pessimistic. It is terrible not to help people. It seems to me
you hinder people when you write as you do."

"I must write as the spirit moves me," said Florence, in a would-be
flippant voice, "and Tom likes my writing; he says it grows on him."

"So much the worse for Tom."

"Well, I will say good-night now, Edith. I am tired, and mother will be
disturbed if I go to bed too late."

Florence went into her own flat, shut and locked the door, and, lying
down, tried to sleep. But she was excited and nervous, and no repose
would come to her. Up to the present time, since her engagement, she had
managed to keep thought at bay; but now thoughts the most terrible, the
most dreary, came in like a flood and banished sleep. Towards morning
she found herself silently crying.

"Oh, why cannot I break off my engagement with Tom Franks? Why cannot I
tell Maurice Trevor the truth?" she said to herself.

Early the next day Mrs. Aylmer the less received a telegram from Bertha
Keys. This was to announce the death of the owner of Aylmer's Court.
Mrs. Aylmer the less immediately became almost frantic with excitement.
She wanted to insist on Florence accompanying her at once to the Court.
Florence stoutly refused to stir an inch. Finally the widow was obliged
to go off without her daughter.

"There is little doubt," she said, "that we are b