concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence,
would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious
that his engagement should be as short as possible, chiefly from an
uneasy fear that his great happiness might elude him after all. The
idea of losing Mabel became day by day, as he knew her better, a more
intolerable torture, and he could not rest until all danger of that
was at an end. Mabel had no fears of a future in which Mark would be
by her side; and if she was not blind to some little weaknesses in his
character, they did not affect her love and admiration in the
least--she was well content that her hero should not be unpleasantly
perfect. And the weeks slipped by, until Easter, which fell early that
year, had come and gone; the arrangements for the wedding were all
completed, and Mark began to breathe more freely as he saw his
suspense drawing to a happy end.

It was a bleak day towards the end of March, and Mark was walking
across the Park and Gardens from his rooms in South Audley Street to
Malakoff Terrace, charged with a little note from Mabel to Trixie, to
which he was to bring back an answer; for, although Mabel had not made
much progress in the affections of the rest of the Ashburn household,
a warm friendship had sprung up already between herself and Mark's
youngest sister--the only one of them who seemed to appreciate and
love him as he deserved. He felt buoyant and happy as he walked
briskly on, with the blustering north-easter at his back seeming to
clear his horizon of the last clouds which had darkened it. A very
few days more and Mabel would be his own--beyond the power of man to
sunder! and soon, too, he would be able to salve the wound which still
rankled in his conscience--he would have a book of his own. 'Sweet
Bells Jangled' was to appear almost immediately, and he had come to
have high hopes of it; it looked most imposing in proof--it was so
much longer than 'Illusion;' he had worked up a series of such
overwhelming effects in it; its pages contained matter to please every
variety of taste--flippancy and learning, sensation and sentiment,
careful dissection of character and audacious definition and
epigram--failure seemed to him almost impossible. And when he could
feel able to lay claim legitimately to the title of genius, surely
then the memory of his fraud would cease to reproach him--the means
would be justified by the result. He amused himself by compo