rtainly is both exciting and comforting to hear that man
and woman are ready to join in a mutual affirmative, say Yes together
again. It sounds like the end of the war.

The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State
and the greatest heiress of her day; notoriously 'The young Minister of
State' of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman
madly enamoured of him--and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a
Duchy; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their
beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place. It did
away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise
abroad like nonsense. The Hon. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper; and
she rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the
Papists. She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily
for the Protestant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal.
Town and country buzzed the news; and while that dreary League trumpeted
about the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental
chattered of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely
state, with every musical accessory, short of Operatic.

Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement. The excellent woman
enjoyed marriages of High Life: which, as there is presumably wealth
to support them, are manifestly under sanction: and a marriage that she
could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a
marriage in the family; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter
of her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the
pomp that bids the heavens open. She and no other spread the tidings of
Miss Asper's debating upon the step to Rome at the very instant of Percy
Dacier's declaration of his love; and it was a beautiful struggle, that
of the half-dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love
prevailing! She sent word to Lady Dunstane: 'You know the interest I
have always taken in dear Constance Aspen' etc.; inviting her to come on
a visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the
ceremony of a wedding 'likely to be the grandest of our time.' Pitiful
though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days
at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their 'mutual devotion to
duty' was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers.

Lady Dunstane declined the invitation. She waited to