to marry; she may be pretty,
but she does not know how to dress. I wish you could have seen her
to-night; she had on mauve with old gold trimmings. Now with one of her
complexion--But I forget you haven't seen her. Bertram, I think I shall
give a German next month, will you come? Oh, Edward!" as if the thought
had suddenly struck her, "Princess Louise _is_ the sixth child of Queen
Victoria; I asked Mr. Turner to-night. By the way, I wonder if it will
be pleasant enough to take the horses out to-morrow? Bird has been
obliging enough to get sick just in the height of the season, Mr.
Mandeville. There are a thousand things I have got to do and I hate
hired horses." And with a petulant sigh she laid her prayer-book on the
table and with a glance in the mirror near by, began pulling off her
gloves in the slow and graceful fashion eminently in keeping with her
every movement.

It was as if an atmosphere of worldliness had settled down upon this
room sanctified a moment before by the utterances of a pure and noble
love. Mr. Sylvester looked uneasy, while Bertram searched in vain for
something to say.

"I seem to have brought a blight," she suddenly murmured in an easy tone
somewhat at variance with the glance of half veiled suspicion which she
darted from under her heavy lids, at first one and then the other of the
two gentlemen before her. "No, I will not sit," she added as her husband
offered her a chair. "I am tired almost to death and would retire
immediately, but I interrupted you I believe in the utterance of some
wise saying about matrimony. It is an interesting subject and I have a
notion to hear what one so well qualified to speak in regard to it--"
and here she made a slow, half lazy courtesy to her husband with a look
that might mean anything from coquetry to defiance--"has to say to a
young man like Mr. Mandeville."

Edward Sylvester who was regarded as an autocrat among men, and who
certainly was an acknowledged leader in any company he chose to enter,
bowed his head before this anomalous glance with a gesture of something
like submission.

"One is not called upon to repeat every inadvertent phrase he may
utter," said he. "Bertram was consulting me upon certain topics and--"

"You answered him in your own brilliant style," she concluded. "What did
you say?" she asked in another moment in a low unmoved tone which the
final act of smoothing out her gloves on the table with hands delicate
as white rose leaves