“Me dear”—­my mother-in-law always completes this story with this sentence—­“Mr. Gurrage said to me, ’Mark my word, Mary Jane, the boy will get on!’”

In the class of my belle famille, mourning is fortunately a matter of such importance that the wearing of crepe for grandmamma has been allowed to be sufficient reason for abandoning the wedding rejoicings.

Dear grandmamma! it would please you to know your death had done me even this service.  I am encouraged to grieve, especially in public.  Mrs. Gurrage herself put on black, and her face beamed all over with enjoyable tears the first Sunday we rustled into the family pew stiff with crepe and hangings of woe.  They gave grandmamma what Miss Hoad—­I mean Amelia—­called a “proper funeral.”

And so all is done—­even the Marquis has gone back to France, and only Roy is left.

There is something in his brown eyes of sympathy which I cannot bear; the lump keeps coming in my throat.  Kind dog, you are my friend.

Next week Lady Tilchester will have returned to Harley, and soon Augustus and I are to go and pay a three days’ visit there.

Once what joy this thought would have caused me—­I was going to say when I was young!—­I shall be twenty next October, but I feel as if I must be at least fifty years old.

Augustus is not a gay companion.  He has a sulky temper; he is often offended with me for no reason, and then a day or so afterwards will be horribly affectionate, and give me a present to make up for it.  I can never get accustomed to his calling me Ambrosine—­it always jars, as if one suddenly heard a shopman taking this liberty.  It is equally unpleasant as “little woman” or “dearie,” both of which besprinkle all his sentences.  He has not a mind that makes it possible to have any conversation with him.  He told me to-day that I was the stupidest cold statue of a woman he had ever met, and then he shook me until I felt giddy, and kissed me until I could not see.  After a scene of this kind I feel too limp to move.  I creep out into the garden and hide with Roy in a clump of laurel bushes, where there is a neglected sun-dial that was once the centre of the old garden, and left there when the new shrubbery was planted; there is about six feet bare space around it, and no one ever comes there, so I am safe.

Sometimes from my hiding-place I hear Augustus calling me, but I never answer, and yesterday I caught sight of him through the bushes biting his nails with annoyance; he could not think where I had disappeared to.  It comforted me to sit there and make faces at him like a gutter-child.

I have never had the courage to go back to the cottage.  It is just as it was, with all grandmamma’s dear old things in it, waiting for me to decide where I will have them put.  Hephzibah has married her grocer’s man, and lives there as caretaker.

I suppose some day I shall have to go down and settle things, but I feel as if it would be desecration to bring the Sevres and miniatures and the Louis XV. bergere here to hobnob with the new productions from Tottenham Court Road.