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Elizabeth would have cared more for the memory of Malcolm Forde than for worldly advantages.'

'No,' answered Elizabeth defiantly, 'I am not so slavish as to go on breaking my heart about a man for ever. And living screwed up in this box of a house has taught me the value of surroundings.'

'You will go to live at Ashcombe, I suppose,' suggested Gertrude, with the dowager and Miss Disney? I can fancy how nice that will be for you.'

'I shall do nothing of the kind. I mean to live in the world, in the very centre of the great whirlpool to go spinning round perpetually in the fashionable maelstrom.'

A hazardous life for the welfare of an immortal soul,' said Gertrude.

'I have ceased to care for my soul since Malcolm gave me up. Indeed, I have a suspicion that my soul ceased to exist when he went away, leaving only some kind of mechanism in its place.'

CHAPTER IV.

'Hoyden. This very morning my lord told me I should have two hundred a year to buy pins. Now, nurse, if he gives me two hundred a year to buy pins, what do you think he'll give me to buy fine petticoats?

Nurse. O, my dearest, he deceives thee foully, and he's no better than a rogue for his pains. These Londoners have got a gibberish with 'em would confound a gipsy. That which they call pin-money is to buy their wives everything in the varsal world, down to their very shoe-ties.'

UNBOUNDED was the rapture of Mrs. Chevenix when she received the unlooked-for tidings of Elizabeth's engagement. She wrote at once urging that the wedding should take place in London. It will be just the height of the season,' she said, 'and everybody in town. Gertrude, Di, and Blanche can come up with you. I will stretch a point, and find rooms for all of you. You could not possibly be married from that footy little house in the Boroughbridge-road. And there will be your trousseau, you know, dear, a most serious question; for of course everything must be in the highest style, and I really

doubt whether Cerise-whose real name, by the bye, I have lately discovered to be Jones-is quite up to the mark for this occasion. She suits me very well, but I have lately discovered a want of originality in her style; so I think the better way would be to order your superior dinner and evening dresses from Paris, and give Cerise only the secondary ones. Believe me, my dear child, I shall not shrink from expense, but we will not fall into that foolish trick of ordering more dresses than you could wear in six months, ignoring the almost hourly changes of fashion. As Lord Paulyn's wife, you will, of course, have unlimited means. By the way, as you have really no responsible male relative, the arrangement of settlements will devolve upon me. My lawyers, Messrs. Pringle and Scrupress, are well up in that kind of work, and will, I am sure, protect your interests as carefully as if you were the daughter of their oldest and most important client.'

This subject, thus mooted for the first time in Mrs. Chevenix's letter, was destined to cause a good deal of argument and unpleasantness between the aunt and niece.

'I will have no settlement,' said Elizabeth resolutely. 'I take nothing to him, except sixty or seventy pounds a year, and he shall not be asked to

settle ever so many hundreds upon me. I will not quite sell myself. Of course, he will give me fine dresses and all I can want to make a brilliant figure in his own world. He has been patient enough and devoted enough for me to trust my interests to him. It stands to reason that I shall always have as much money as I can spend. He is overflowing with riches, and as his wife I shall have a right to my share of them. But I will not allow any one to ask him to name the price that he is willing to give for me. It shall not be quite a matter of buying and selling.'

'Very high-flown notions, and worthy of the most self-willed unreasonable young woman that ever lived,' exclaimed Mrs. Chevenix in a rage. 'But I suppose you would hardly wish your children to starve. You will not object to their interests being provided for by people who know a little more about life than you do, self-opinionated as you may be.'

6

My children!' said Elizabeth, turning very pale. Could there be children, the very sanctification and justification of marriage, for her and for Reginald Paulyn, who in marriage sought only the gratification of their own selfish and sordid desires? My children! I can hardly fancy that I shall ever hear a voice call me mother. I seem so unfit to have little children loving me and trusting in me, in their blind

VOL. II.

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