of it. It was a joke, was not it?" with an eager stress.

"On the contrary," replies Belinda, with as icy a composure as if her lover's bloodless eld were infectious, and she had caught it; "the day is fixed !”

In her hasty entrance Sarah had left the door ajar, and through it her grandmother now enters; having apparently overheard the last words.

"The day fixed!" repeats she, with her eyes dancing; "my dear Belinda, you take us by storm! we are in a whirl! But fixed for when ?"

For the 10th of next month," replies Belinda curtly, turning away her dull face from her beaming questioner, and speaking in a key, if possible, yet more frozen than before.

"The 10th!" repeats Mrs. Churchill, in a tone into which she honestly, if not very successfully, tries to infuse a tinge of regret ; "that is soon! You are in a hurry to leave us !"

"There is nothing to wait for," replies

Belinda, mechanically repeating her dreary formula.

"I cannot think how we shall manage about your clothes!" continues Mrs. Churchill, growing pink with pleasure, and her old dimple reappearing. "We shall be shockingly hurried! we must go about your underclothes and lingerie this afternoon. Mary Smith in Sloane Street is excellent, is not she, Sarah? but she has already half a dozen wedding orders."

"She may be spared a seventh," replies Belinda, with a bitter small smile. "I will have no new clothes!"

That means, of course, that you are not in earnest," says Mrs. Churchill, with a disappointed refrigeration of tone; "that the whole thing is a fiction. You might as well have said so at first!"

A flash of hope has come into Sarah's sunny eyes as she looks eagerly at her sister; but at the expression of that sister's face it at once dies down again.

"Do not be afraid," says Belinda quietly, "it is no fiction; but I will have no new

clothes :
s: you

will have the more money to

spend at Monaco."

"Monaco! Monaco!" repeats Mrs. Churchill, hiding a look of conscious guilt

the brain; it is your idée fixe! But as to your clothes

"As to my clothes-simply I will not have any," replies Belinda, with a look of imperative decision.

"I should have thought them the one Goshen in your desert," says Sarah, with annoyed laugh; 'them and the

an

presents."

"Presents!" echoes Belinda impatiently; "I will have no presents!"

"In short," says Mrs. Churchill sarcastically, "you and the Professor will crawl in a four-wheeled cab to a registryoffice at eight o'clock in the morning."

"If you substitute a church for a registryoffice, you have exactly expressed my intention."

There is an aghast silence. Sarah and Mrs. Churchill look at one another.

Something in their interchange of glances grates upon Belinda.

"You will never understand," she says, exchanging her icy calm voice for one of excessive irritability, such irritability as of late her family has been too well acquainted with, "and it is no use explaining to you. I am tired of explaining to you that this is not an ordinary marriage. What is there to make a gala of, and buy new clothes for, in a mere matter of business? I tell you it is a mere matter of business; I keep dinning it into your ears, but you will not understand! it is a mere matter of business!"

She repeats it over and over again, as if to reassure herself by the strength and number of her own repetitions, and looks round at her two auditors, as if daring them to oppose any contradiction to her assertion. Neither of them does. It is, indeed, some moments before either of them finds anything to say. Then

Have you made this quite clear to Professor Forth?" asks Mrs. Churchill drily.

"Quite!" replies Belinda excitedly; quite! I made it as clear as the sun in heaven; he quite understands; he fully agrees with me; he is quite of my way of thinking."

"He must be a very odd bridegroom," says Mrs. Churchill sarcastically.

"It is a marriage of the mind!" replies Belinda, still more excitedly, looking round with angry suspicion in search of the ridicule which she dimly feels may attach to her last utterance. "I do not suppose that there is anything very odd in two people hoping to draw a certain amount of rational happiness from such.”

Mrs. Churchill turns away to conceal an ungovernable smile.

"A marriage of the mind!" repeats Sarah, with a disgusted accent; "well, I have heard of them before, but this is the first time that I ever had the pleasure of meeting one; and I humbly hope it may be the last."