outset.

"How much better," said Isabel, "to go now, when nobody cares
whether you go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched
wedding-breakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting
to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of
honey-moonshine about us; we shall go just like anybody else,--with
a difference, dear, with a difference!" and she took Basil's cheeks
between her hands. In order to do this, she had to ran round the table;
for they were at dinner, and Isabel's aunt, with whom they had begun
married life, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish
thing for Isabel, and she added, with a conscious blush, "We are past
our first youth, you know; and we shall not strike the public as bridal,
shall we? My one horror in life is an evident bride."

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to
be taken for a bride; and for my part I do not object to a woman's being
of Isabel's age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have
been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she
has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when
they met first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring
with an inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken
engagement, which but for that fatality they might have spent together,
he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted
him, more or less; it was part of his love; the loss accounted
irreparable really enriched the final gain.

"I don't know," he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can
whose cheeks are clasped between a lady's hands, "you don't begin very
well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this
way, they will put us into the 'bridal chambers' at all the hotels. And
the cars--they're beginning to have them on the palace-cars."

Just then a shadow fell into the room.

"Wasn't that thunder, Isabel?" asked her aunt, who had been contentedly
surveying the tender spectacle before her. "O dear! you'll never be able
to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It 's actually raining now!"

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All
in a moment, out of the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before
we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the
clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible
violence. In the