A CHAPTER VII. FTER that Christmas morning vain. She may draw what pictures and practise what oratory and cry what tears she chooses. Of what use is it to draw pictures for, or address appeals to, or weep tears over a stone? And as far as any malleability or power of receiving impressions from without goes, Belinda is henceforth a stone. She accepts all her sister's appeals in a sullen, dogged silence. Whether she ever even hears them, Sarah is ignorant. She gives no sign of having done so by any least emotion produced by them. She listens, or seems to listen, with phlegmatic indifference to the sarcasms, vituperations, witticisms, poured from Sarah's cornucopia upon her future husband. They awake in her neither anger nor pain. She makes no effort to check them. Apparently she would as soon hear them as not. But at the end of them, when Sarah, from pure loss of breathnot, heaven knows, from any lack of goodwill-has paused, things are at precisely the same point as they were when she began. Beaten and discouraged, she desists at last. Not, indeed, that she ever constrains herself so far as to omit tacking on some abusive adjective to the name of her future brother-in-law whenever she has occasion to mention him. Nor is it until she has exhausted every possible expletive that, as far as she knows, the English language contains, and applied them not only to him, but to his mother, that she desists at all. She relieves her feelings by putting all the dogs into mourning, tying a piece of black crape round each of their tails; a proceeding which fills Punch with fury, Slutty with mauvaise honte, and Jane with pride. Jane has that love for finery which is implanted in many plain persons. With a face set like a flint, Belinda marches to her doom. And neither dogs nor men can retard the approach of the date of that doom. There are no preparations to delay it. She has steadfastly adhered to her determination to have no new clothes. "A wilful woman will have her way!" Mrs. Churchill says, shaking that head whose eyes seem to grow brighter and her cheeks pinker and smoother as each day brings her nearer to the 10th of January and the South of France. "I suppose you know your own affairs best; and I fancy that you will not have much need for dress at Oxbridge. The only time that I was there I thought all the women shockingly fagoté !" She stops and shrugs her shoulders at the recollection; but even as she shrugs a smile hovers across her lips. She is thinking that her French tour will be none the worse for having her purse made heavier by the weight of Belinda's trousseau. "I am too annoyed about Belinda," she says on another occasion to her younger granddaughter; “but "but you know how useless argument is! She is as obstinate as a mule; and since she is determined to be no expense to me, I was thinking," her eye lightening, "of getting one or two things for ourselves. I should not wonder if, after all, I might manage to let you have that plush cloak trimmed with fishertails that you asked me for at Coralie's the other day. Come! what do you say?" tapping her cheek with an air of fond friskiness. "I say that I will not have it!" replies Sarah doggedly; "it is blood-money!" The settlements are drawn up. Belinda's widowhood and her younger children are provided for. Bought are license and ring. The latter Professor Forth brought one day to be tried on; and Belinda, with white, shut lips, pallidly essayed it. There is no bustle of arriving parcels, no wedding presents to be displayed. Miss Churchill has sternly insisted upon an absolute secrecy being observed as regards her engagement. She can bear to be married, but gifts and congratulations upon her marriage she could not bear. So that the comers and goers to the little house in Street still come and go, without suspicion that anything out of the ordinary course is brewing beneath its modest roof. Mrs. Churchill would have preferred that the betrothal should be proclaimed from the housetops. It would give it a body and solidity that just at first she fears it lacks. An engagement known to all the world is much more difficult of rupture than one to which only the three or four persons most nearly concerned are privy. "Belinda is so odd and crotchety," she says one afternoon, as she and Sarah are driving home through the Park together; "why, if she is in earnest, should she object to people being told? Do you think there would be any harm in my just giving a hint of it to the Crawfords, and Dalzells, |