prisoner in "the condemned
cell" might have looked at the sheriff, announcing the morning of his
execution, would be to do injustice to the prisoner. He receives _his_
shock without flinching; and, in proof of his composure, celebrates
his wedding with the gallows by a breakfast which he will not live to
digest.

"If you think as your mother does," Romayne began, as soon as he had
recovered his self-possession, "no opinion of mine shall stand in the
way--" He could get no further. His vivid imagination saw the Archbishop
and the bridesmaids, heard the hundred guests and their dreadful
speeches: his voice faltered, in spite of himself.

Stella eagerly relieved him. "My darling, I don't think as my mother
does," she interposed, tenderly. "I am sorry to say we have very few
sympathies in common. Marriages, as I think, ought to be celebrated as
privately as possible--the near and dear relations present, and no
one else. If there must be rejoicings and banquets, and hundreds of
invitations, let them come when the wedded pair are at home after the
honeymoon, beginning life in earnest. These are odd ideas for a woman to
have--but they _are_ my ideas, for all that."

Romayne's face brightened. "How few women possess your fine sense and
your delicacy of feeling!" he exclaimed "Surely your mother must give
way, when she hears we are both of one mind about our marriage."

Stella knew her mother too well to share the opinion thus expressed.
Mrs. Eyrecourt's capacity for holding to her own little ideas, and for
persisting (where her social interests were concerned) in trying to
insinuate those ideas into the minds of other persons, was a capacity
which no resistance, short of absolute brutality, could overcome. She
was perfectly capable of worrying Romayne (as well as her daughter) to
the utmost limits of human endurance, in the firm conviction that she
was bound to convert all heretics, of their way of thinking, to the
orthodox faith in the matter of weddings. Putting this view of the case
with all possible delicacy, in speaking of her mother, Stella expressed
herself plainly enough, nevertheless, to enlighten Romayne.

He made another suggestion. "Can we marry privately," he said, "and tell
Mrs. Eyrecourt of it afterward?"

This essentially masculine solution of the difficulty was at once
rejected. Stella was too good a daughter to suffer her mother to be
treated with even the appearance of disrespect. "Oh," she said, "thin