bidding adieu to his ally. The bride turns to her sister:

"It is done now!" she says pantingly; "there is no going back from it now !"

None!" replies Sarah dully.

"Say something to me, Sarah; wish me something good!"

She has flung her arms round her sister in an épanchement most unusual with her. Her icy cheek is hard pressed against her sister's hot and tear-reddened one.

"I wish you I wish you-" cries Sarah, stammering, what between her sobs, the almost ungovernable impulse to invoke upon her sister a speedy widowhood, and the hopelessness of finding any other wish. that will not sound a mockery.

"You - you cannot find anything to wish me !" says Belinda tremulously. "You are right; there is nothing."

"I-I wish you," says Sarah, driven to desperation by this tone, and clinging convulsively to her sister as though ten bridegrooms should not force them apart—“I wish you many happy returns of the day!"

breaking into an hysterical laugh.

"That

is ambiguous! I may attach what meaning I choose to it."

These are the last words Belinda Forth hears, before the brougham whirls her away. The Churchill cousin takes Sarah home in a hansom, and a very unpleasant drive he has, as she cries violently the whole way, in passionate self-reproach at having found nothing kinder to say.

B

CHAPTER VIII.

ELINDA has been married three days. We are creatures of habit, as everyone knows; and it is surprising with what quick pliability we find ourselves cutting off and tucking in whatever angles prevent our fitting into any new niche that it may be our fate to occupy. But this process, though rapid, is usually of somewhat longer accomplishment than three days. At all events, Belinda has not yet got into the habit of being married. There still seems to her something improbable-nay, monstrous-in the fact of herself sitting opposite to Professor Forth at breakfast in their Folkestone lodgings, pouring weak tea for him out of

a Britannia metal teapot, and sedulously recollecting how many lumps of sugar he likes, as she has already discovered that he has an objection to repeating the information. Nor is it less monstrous to be warming his overcoat, and cutting his newspapers, and ordering his dinners with that nice attention to digestibility and economy which she finds to be expected of her. They have been enormously long, these three days. It seems to her as if for months she has been looking at those hideous ornaments on the drawing-room chimney-piece, and trying to draw the skimp summer curtains that will not draw across the shutterless windows, rattled by the wind. For months she has been listening to the eternal sighing, sobbing, whistling, howling of that same wind, and to the sea banging on the cold shore. For months she has been walking with Professor Forth up and down, up and down the Leas, six turns this way, six turns that way. For months she has been writing his letters till her hand. ached, and reading aloud to him till her

voice cracked. As for the reading and writing, she cannot have too much of them -the more the better! There is nothing like occupation-a continuous, settled occupation-nothing like occupation for keeping out of one's head those words of Sarah's that ring so foolishly dinning in her ears, "There is no sense in it! there is no sense in it!" She will not listen to them. Even if they are true, of what profit to hearken to them now? And reading and writing render conversation, too, less necessary. It is certain that, however determinately anyone may have confined his or her contemplation of another person's character to the intellectual side of it, it is impossible to live with that person without discovering that he or she has another side. Belinda has already discovered that her Professor has another. It is surprising how much less of his conversation has turned during the last three days upon the problems of the mind and the sayings of the mighty dead, than upon the price of coals and the wickedness of lodging-house servants. The