," said Emily. "I shall
try to bear it without assistance."

Then the journey from Italy to England was made without much
gratification or excitement, and the Rowley family again found
themselves at Gregg's Hotel.

CHAPTER LXXXVIII.

CROPPER AND BURGESS.

We must now go back to Exeter and look after Mr. Brooke Burgess and
Miss Dorothy Stanbury. It is rather hard upon readers that they
should be thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence,
to the preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the
nature of a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards
its close. In this little history there are, we fear, three or four
more to come. We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh
Stanbury's treachery, or death,--or the possibility that he after all
may turn out to be the real descendant of the true Lord Peterborough
and the actual inheritor of the title and estate of Monkhams, nor
will we speak of Nora's certain fortitude under either of these
emergencies. But the instructed reader must be aware that Camilla
French ought to have a husband found for her; that Colonel Osborne
should be caught in some matrimonial trap,--as, how otherwise
should he be fitly punished?--and that something should be at least
attempted for Priscilla Stanbury, who from the first has been
intended to be the real heroine of these pages. That Martha should
marry Giles Hickbody, and Barty Burgess run away with Mrs. MacHugh,
is of course evident to the meanest novel-expounding capacity; but
the fate of Brooke Burgess and of Dorothy will require to be evolved
with some delicacy and much detail.

There was considerable difficulty in fixing the day. In the first
place Miss Stanbury was not very well,--and then she was very
fidgety. She must see Brooke again before the day was fixed, and
after seeing Brooke she must see her lawyer. "To have a lot of money
to look after is more plague than profit, my dear," she said to
Dorothy one day; "particularly when you don't quite know what you
ought to do with it." Dorothy had always avoided any conversation
with her aunt about money since the first moment in which she had
thought of accepting Brooke Burgess as her husband. She knew that
her aunt had some feeling which made her averse to the idea that any
portion of the property which she had inherited should be enjoyed by
a Stanbury after her death, and Dorothy, guided by this knowledge,
had almost convinc