ason:--lovers must live like ordinary people outwardly; and say, ye
Fates, how had she been educated to direct a gentlemen's household?

"I can't exist on potatoes," he pronounced humorously.

But when his thoughts began to dwell with fitting seriousness on the
woman-of-the-world tone to be expected from Lady Charlotte, he folded
the mental image of Emilia closely to his breast, and framed a misty
idea of a little lighted cottage wherein she sat singing to
herself while he was campaigning. "Two or three fellows--Lumley and
Fredericks--shall see her," he thought. The rest of his brother officers
were not even to know that he was married.

His yacht was lying in a strip of moonlight near Sir Twickenham's
companion yawl. He gave one glance at it as at a history finished, and
sent up his name to Lady Charlotte.

"Ah! you haven't brought the good old dame with you?" she said, rising
to meet him. "I thought it better not to see her to-night."

He acquiesced, mentioning the lateness of the hour, and adding, "You are
alone?"

She stared, and let fall "Certainly," and then laughed. "I had forgotten
your regard for the proprieties. I have just sent my maid for Georgiana;
she will sleep here. I preferred to come here, because those people at
the hotel tire me; and, besides, I said I should sleep at the villa, and
I never go back to people who don't expect me."

Wilfrid looked about the room perplexed, and almost suspicious because
of his unexplained perplexity. Her (as he deemed it--not much above
the level of Mrs. Chump in that respect) aristocratic indifference to
opinion and conventional social observances would have pleased him by
daylight, but it fretted him now.

Lady Charlotte's maid came in to say that Miss Ford would join her. The
maid was dismissed to her bed. "There's nothing to do there," said her
mistress, as she was moving to the folding-doors. The window facing
seaward was open. He went straight to it and closed it. Next, in an
apparent distraction, he went to the folding-doors. He was about to
press the handle, when Lady Charlotte's quiet remark, "My bedroom,"
brought him back to his seat, crying pardon.

"Have you had news?" she inquired. "You thought that a letter might be
there. Bad, is it?"

"It is not good," he replied, briefly.

"I am sorry."

"That is--it tells me--" (Wilfrid disciplined his tongue) "that I--we
are--a lieutenant on half-pay may say that he is ruined, I suppose, when
his other