inning to take down her crimps.

"See him? Gertrude, are you mad? Your father will never allow it."

"Mr. Hogg, mother."

"Oh!"

They exchanged glances and smiles. Mrs. Ross hurried down to breakfast,
not to keep her husband waiting, and Gertrude presently followed in
handsome morning toilet, and in apparently quite gay spirits; a trifle
pale, but only enough so to make her interesting, her mother said.

Mr. Ross and Philip, Jr., had already gone away to their place of
business, Sophie and the younger boys to school, and only Mrs. Ross and
Kate were left, the latter of whom had little to say, but regarded her
sister with a sort of contemptuous pity.

Gertrude had scarcely finished her meal, when the door-bell rang, and she
was summoned to the drawing-room to receive her visitor.

The wedding came off at the appointed time. There was a change of
bridegrooms, that was all; and few could decide whether the invitations
had been a ruse, so far as he was concerned--or if that were not so, how
the change had been brought about.

In a long letter to Violet Travilla, Kate Ross gave the details of the
whole affair.

A strange, sad story it seemed to Vi and her sister. They could not in the
least understand how Gertrude could feel or act as she had done, and
feared she would find, as Kate expressed it, "even a gold lined sty, but a
hard bed to lie in, with no love to soften it."

"Still," they said to each other, "it was better, a thousand times better,
than marrying that dreadful Mr. Larrabee."

For Kate had assured them Mr. Hogg was "an honest, honorable man, and not
ill-tempered; only an intolerable bore--so stupid and uninteresting."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIFTH.

"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
--GAL. vi. 7.

Elsie and her children returned home healthful and happy, with scarce any
but pleasing recollections of the months that had just passed.

Not so with Mrs. Conly and Virginia. They seemed soured and disappointed;
nothing had gone right with them; their finery was all spoiled, and they
were worn out--with the journey they said, but in reality far more by late
hours and dissipation of one sort and another.

The flirtation with Captain Brice had not ended in anything
serious--except the establishing of a character for coquetry for
Virginia--nor had several others which followed in quick succession.

The girl had much ado to conceal her cha