etting my
trousseau until after I am married. If I succeed in getting a wedding
dress and something to go away in by the twenty-sixth, I shall consider
myself lucky!'

Miss Abingdon, to whose Early Victorian mind a wedding was still an
occasion for tears, sighed over her niece's engagement because Jane
never came to her room at night to water her couch with tears, nor had
doubts or presentiments or misgivings.

'She seems to have so little sense of responsibility,' she sighed to
Mrs. Wrottesley, whose visits at this trying time were a cause of
nothing but comfort to her.

'I know,' said Mrs. Wrottesley--in the hesitating manner of the woman
who might have been 'advanced' had she not married a clergyman--'I know
it may seem to you irreverent to say so, but I sometimes think that
marriage is not undertaken lightly and unadvisedly enough. It seems to
me that nowadays the tendency is to consider the matter almost too
seriously, and that a certain light-hearted impulse is really what is
required before taking what is called the plunge.'

Miss Abingdon--not by any means for the first time--felt regret that
Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more
orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely
not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean
on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and
becoming attitude for all women.

'I am afraid we must not tamper with the Prayer Book,' she said
reprovingly; and Mrs. Wrottesley, who for twenty years had been silent
under reproof, relapsed into silence again.

Jane, meanwhile, was saying good-bye to every tenant on Miss Abingdon's
small estate. To her hunters she confided the good news that they were
going with her when she married, and that they would hunt with her as
before. And the stable cat, whom she took up in her arms and kissed
affectionately, was told that he really must not mind saying good-bye,
for that she, Jane, would only be two miles off, so that the stable cat
needn't look quite so disconsolate. The proverbial old nurse in the
village had to be visited, and the school-children asked to tea, and
tenants and gardeners to dinner; and every one was in a highly nervous
state of preparation, and in a still more delightful state of
anticipation.

Miss Abingdon enjoyed the dear fussiness of the wedding preparations,
and thought in her secret heart that Mrs. Ogilvie missed all t