eautiful.

The wedding breakfast was as other wedding feasts. People ate and drank
and made believe to be intensely glad, and drank more sparkling wine
than was good for them at that abnormal hour, and began to feel sleepy
before the speeches, brief as they were, had come to an end. The August
sun shone in upon the banquet, the creams and jellies languished and
collapsed in the sultry air. The wedding-cake was felt to be a
nuisance. The cracker-cake exploded faintly in the languid hands of the
younger guests, and those ridiculous mottoes, which could hardly amuse
anyone out of Earlswood Asylum, were looked at a shade more
contemptuously than usual. The weather was too warm for enthusiasm. And
Violet's pale set face was almost as disheartening as the skeleton at
an Egyptian banquet. When Mrs. Tempest retired to put on her
travelling-dress Violet went with her, a filial attention the mother
had in no wise expected.

"Dear girl," she said, squeezing her daughter's hand, "to-day is not to
make the slightest difference."

"I hope not, mamma," answered Violet gravely; "but one can never tell
what is in the future. God grant you may be happy!"

"I'm sure it will be my own fault if I am not happy with Conrad," said
the wife of an hour, "and oh, Violet! my constant prayer will be to see
you more attached to him."

Violet made no reply, and here happily Pauline brought the
fawn-coloured travelling-dress, embroidered with poppies and
cornflowers in their natural colours, after the style of South
Kensington, a dress so distractingly lovely that it instantly put an
end to serious conversation. The whole costume had been carefully
thought out, a fawn-coloured parasol, edged with ostrich feathers, a
fawn-coloured bonnet, fawn-coloured Hessian boots, fawn-coloured
Swedish gloves with ten buttons--all prepared for the edification of
railway guards and porters, and Scotch innkeepers and their
_valetaille_.

Verily there are some games which seem hardly worth the candle that
lights the players. And there was once upon a time an eccentric
nobleman who was accounted maddest in that he made his wife dress
herself from head to foot in one colour. Other times, other manners.

Violet stayed with her mother to the last, receiving the last
embrace--a fond and tearful one--and watched the carriage drive away
from the porch amidst a shower of rice. And then all was over. The best
people were bidding her a kindly good-bye. Carriages drove u