CHAPTER XXVII.

"'Tis now the summer of your youth; time has not cropt the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them."

--The Gamester.

THE wedding--a very private one--goes off charmingly. The day breaks calm, smilingly, rich with beauty. "Lovely are the opening eyelids of the morn."

Georgie, in her wedding garments, looking like some pale white lily, is indeed "passing fair." She is almost too pallid, but the very pallor adds to the extreme purity and childishness of her beauty, and makes the gazer confident "there's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple." Dorian, tall and handsome, and unmistakably content, seems a very fit guardian for so fragile a flower.

Of course the marriage gives rise to much comment in the county, Branscombe being direct heir to the Sartoris title, and presumably the future possessor of all his uncle's private wealth. That he should marry a mere governess, a positive nobody, horrifies the county, and makes its shrug its comfortable shoulders and give way to more malicious talk than is at all necessary. With some, the pretty bride is an adventuress, and, indeed,--in the very softest of soft whispers, and with a gentle rustling of indignant skirts,--not altogether as correct as she might be. There are a few who choose to believe her of good family, but "awfully out-at-elbows, don't you know; "a still fewer who declare | | 217 she is charming all round and fit for anything; and hardly one who does not consider her, at heart, fortunate and designing.

One or two rash and unsophisticated girls venture on the supposition that perhaps, after all, it is a real bonâ fide love-match, and make the still bolder suggestion that a governess may have a heart as well as other people. But these silly children are pushed out of sight, and very sensibly pooh-poohed, and are told, with a little clever laugh, that they "are quite too sweet, and quite dear babies, and they must try and keep on thinking all that sort of pretty rubbish as long as ever they can. It is so successful, and so very taking nowadays."

Dorian is regarded as an infatuated, misguided young man, who should never have been allowed out without a keeper. Such a disgraceful flinging away of opportunities, and birth, and position, to marry a woman so utterly out of his own set! No wonder his poor uncle refused to be present at the ceremony,--actually ran away from home to avoid it. And-so--by the by, talking of running away, what was that affair about that little girl at the mill? Wasn't Branscombe's name mixed up with it unpleasantly? Horrid low, you know, that sort of thing, when one is found out.

The county is quite pleased with its own gossip, and drinks innumerable cups of choicest tea over it, out of the very daintiest Derby and Sevres and "Wooster," and is actually merry at the expense of the newly-wedded. Only a very few brave men, among whom is Mr. Kennedy, who is staying with the Luttrels, give it as their opinion that Branscombe is a downright lucky fellow and has got the handsomest wife in the neighborhood.

Towards the close of July, contrary to expectation, Mr. and Mrs. Branscombe return to Pullingham, and, in spite of censure, and open protest, are literally inundated with cards from all sides.

The morning after her return, Georgie drives down to Gowran, to see Clarissa, and tell her "all the news," as she declares in her first breath.

"It was all too enchanting," she says, in her quick, vivacious way. "I enjoyed it so. All the lovely old churches, and the lakes, and the bones of the dear saints, and | | 218 everything. But I missed you, do you know,--yes, really, without flattery, I mean. Every time I saw anything specially desirable, I felt I wanted you to see it too. And so one day I told Dorian I was filled with a mad longing to talk to you once again, and I think he rather jumped at the suggestion of coming home forthwith; and--why, here we are."

"I can't say how glad I am that you are here," says Clarissa. "It was too dreadful without you both. I am so delighted you had such a really good time and were so happy."

"Happy!--I am quite that," says Mrs. Branscombe, easily. "I can always do just what I please, and there is nobody now to scold or annoy me in any way."

"And you have Dorian to love," says Clarissa, a little gravely, she hardly knows why. It is perhaps the old curious want in Georgie's tone that has again impressed her.

"Love, love, love," cries that young woman, a little impatiently. "Why are people always talking, about love? Does it really make the world go round, I wonder? Yes, of course I have Dorian to be fond of now." She rises impulsively, and, walking to one of the windows, gazes out upon the gardens beneath. "Come," she says, step-ping on to the veranda; "come out with me. I want to breathe your. flowers again."

Clarissa follows her, and together they wander up and down among the heavy roses and drooping lilies, that are languid with heat and sleep. Here all the children of the sun and dew seem to grow and flourish.

Dorian, coming up presently to meet his wife and drive her home, finds her and Clarissa laughing gayly over one of Georgie's foreign reminiscences. He walks so slowly over the soft green grass that they do not hear him until he is quite close to them.

"Ah! you have come, Dorian," says Dorian's wife, with a pretty smile, "but too soon. Clarissa and I haven't half said all we have to say yet."

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"At least I have said how glad I am to have you both back," says Clarissa. "The whole thing has been quite too awfully dismal without you. But for Jim and papa I should have gone mad, or something. I never put in such a horrid time. Horace came down occasionally,--very occasionally,--out of sheer pity, I believe; and Lord Sartoris was a real comfort, he visited so often; but he has gone away again."

"Has he? I suppose our return frightened him," says Branscombe, in a peculiar tone.

"I have been telling Clarissa how we tired of each other long before the right time," says Georgie, airily, "and how we came home to escape being bored to death by our own dulness."

Dorian laughs.

"She says what she likes," he tells Clarissa. "Has she yet put on the dignified stop for you? It would quite subdue any one to see her at the head of her table. Last night it was terrible. She seemed to grow several inches taller, and looked so severe that, long before it was time for him to retire, Martin was on the verge of nervous tears. I could have wept for him, he looked so disheartened."

"I'm perfectly certain Martin adores me," says Mrs. Branscombe, indignantly, "and I couldn't be severe or dignified to save my life. Clarissa, you must forgive me if I remove Dorian at once, before he says anything worse. He is quite untrustworthy. Good-by, dearest, and be sure you come up to see me to-morrow. I want to ask you ever so many more questions."

"Cards from the duchess for a garden-party," says Georgie, throwing the invitations in question across the breakfast-table to her husband. It is quite a week later, and she has almost settled down into the conventional married woman, though not altogether. To be entirely married--that is, sedate and sage--is quite beyond Georgie. Just now some worrying thought is oppressing her, and spoiling the flavor of her tea; her kidney loses its grace, her toast its crispness. She peeps at Dorian from behind the huge silver urn that seeks jealously to conceal her from view, and says, plaintively,--

"Is the duchess a very grand person, Dorian?"

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"She is an awfully fat person, at all events," says Dorian, cheerfully. "I never saw any one who could beat her in that line. She'd take a prize, I think. She is not a bad old thing when in a good temper, but that is so painfully seldom. Will you go?"

"I don't know,"-doubtfully. Plainly, she is in the lowest depths of despair. "I-I--think I would rather not."

"I think you had better, darling."

"But you said just now she was always in a bad temper."

"Always? Oh, no; I am sure I couldn't have said that. And, besides, she won't go for you, you know, even if she is. The duke generally comes in for it. And by this time he rather enjoys it, I suppose,-as custom makes us love most things."

"But, Dorian, really now, what is she like?"

"I can't say that: it is a tremendous question. I don't know what she is; I only know what she is not."

"What, then?"

"'Fashioned so slenderly, young and so fair,'" quotes he, promptly. At which they both laugh.

"If she is an old dowdy," says Mrs. Branscombe, some-what irreverently, "I sha'n't be one scrap afraid of her, and I do so want to go right over the castle. Somebody--Lord Alfred--would take me, I dare say. Yes,"--with sudden animation,--"let us go."

"I shall poison Lord Alfred presently," says Dorian, calmly. "Nothing shall prevent me. Your evident determination to spend your day with him has sealed his doom. Very well: send an answer, and let us spend a 'nice long happy day in the country.'"

"We are always spending that, aren't we?" says. Mrs, Branscombe, adorably. Then, with a sigh, "Dorian, what shall I wear?"

He doesn't answer. For the moment he is engrossed, being deep in his "Times," busy studying the murders, divorces, Irish atrocities, and other pleasantries it contains.

"Dorian, do put down that abominable paper," exclaims she again, impatiently, leaning her arms on the table, and regarding him anxiously from the right side of the very forward urn that still will come in her way. "What shall I wear?"

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"It can't matter," says Dorian: "you look lovely in everything, so it is impossible for you to make a mistake."

"It is a pity you can't talk sense,"--reproachfully. Then, with a glance literally heavy with care, "There is that tea-green satin trimmed with Chantilly."

"I forget it," says Dorian, professing the very deepest interest, "but I know it is all things."

"No, it isn't: I can't bear the sleeves. Then"-discontentedly--"there is that velvet."

"The very thing,"--enthusiastically.

"Oh, Dorian, dear! What are you thinking of? Do remember how warm the weather is."

"Well, so it is,--grilling," says Mr. Branscombe, nobly confessing his fault.

"Do you like me in that olive silk?" asks she, hope-fully, gazing at him with earnest intense eyes.

"Don't I just?" returns he, fervently, rising to enforce his words.

"Now, don't be sillier than you can help," murmurs she, with a lovely smile. "Don't! I like that gown myself, you know: it makes me look so nice and old, and that."

"If I were a little girl like you," says Mr. Branscombe, "I should rather hanker after looking nice and young."

"But not too much so: it is frivolous when one is once married." This pensively, and with all the air of one who has long studied the subject.

"Is it? Of course you know best, your experience being greater than mine," says Dorian, meekly, "but, just for choice, I prefer youth to anything else."

"Do you? Then I suppose I had better wear white."

"Yes, do. One evening, in Paris, you wore a white gown of some sort, and I dreamt of you every night for a week afterwards."

"Very well. I shall give you a chance of dreaming of me again," says Georgie, with a carefully suppressed sigh, that is surely meant for the beloved olive gown.

The sigh is wasted. When she does don the white gown so despised, she is so perfect a picture that one might well be excused for wasting seven long nights in airy visions filled all with her. Some wild artistic marguerites are in her bosom (she plucked them herself from | | 222 out the meadow an hour agone); her lips are red, and parted; her hair, that is loosely knotted, and hangs low down, betraying the perfect shape of her small head, is "yellow, like ripe corn." She smiles as she places her hand in Dorian's and asks him how she looks; while he, being all too glad because of her excessive beauty, is very slow to answer her. In truth, she is "like the snow-drop fair, and like the primrose sweet."

At the castle she creates rather a sensation. Many, as yet, have not seen her; and these stare at her placidly, indifferent to the fact that breeding would have it otherwise.

"What a peculiarly pretty young woman," says the duke, half an hour after her arrival, staring at her through his glasses. He had been absent when she came, and so is only just now awakened to a sense of her charms.

"Who?--what?" says the duchess, vaguely, she being the person he has rashly addressed. She is very fat, very unimpressionable, and very fond of argument. "Oh! over there. I quite forget who she is. But I do see that Alfred is making himself, as usual, supremely ridiculous with her. With all his affected devotion to Helen, he runs after every fresh face he sees."

"'There's nothing like a plenty,'" quotes the duke, with a dry chuckle at his own wit; indeed he prides himself upon having been rather a "card" in his day, and anything but a "k'rect" one, either.

"Yes, there is,--there is propriety," responds the duchess, in an awful tone.

"That wouldn't be a bit like it," says the duke, still openly amused at his own humor; after which--thinking it, perhaps, safer to withdraw while there is yet time, he saunters off to the left, and, as he has a trick of looking over his shoulder while walking, nearly falls into Dorian's arms at the next turn.

"Ho, hah! " says his Grace, pulling himself up very shortly, and glancing at his stumbling-block to see if he can identify him.

"Why, it is you, Branscombe," he says, in his usual cheerful, if rather fussy, fashion. "So glad to see you!--so glad." He has made exactly this remark to Dorian every time he has come in contact with him during the past twenty years and more. "By the by, I dare say you | | 223 can tell me,--who is that pretty child over there, with the white frock and the blue eyes?"

"That pretty, child in the frock is my wife," says Branscombe, laughing.

"Indeed! Dear me! dear me! I beg your pardon. My dear boy, I congratulate you. Such a face,--like a Greuze; or a--h'm--yes." Here he grows slightly mixed. "You must introduce me, you know. One likes to do homage to beauty. Why, where could you have met her in this exceedingly deficient county, eh? But you were always a sly dog, eh?"

The old gentleman gives him a playful slap on his shoulder, and then, taking his arm, goes with him across the lawn to where Georgie is standing talking gayly to Lord Alfred.

The introduction is gone through, and Georgie makes her very best bow, and blushes her very choicest blush; but the duke will insist upon shaking hands with her, whereupon, being pleased, she smiles her most enchanting smile.

"So glad to make your acquaintance. Missed you on your arrival," says the duke, genially. "Was toiling through the conservatories, I think, with Lady Loftus. Know her? Stout old lady, with feathers over her nose. She always will go to hot places on hot days."

"I wish she would go to a final hot place, as she affects them so much," says Lord Alfred, gloomily. "I can't bear her; she is always coming here bothering me about that abominable boy of hers in the Guards, and I never know what to say to her."

"Why don't you learn it up at night and say it to her in the morning?" says Mrs. Branscombe, brightly. "I should know what to say to her at once."

"Oh! I dare say," says Lord Alfred. "Only that doesn't help me, you know, because I don't."

"Didn't know who you were, at first, Mrs. Branscombe," breaks in the duke. "Thought you were a little girl--eh?--eh?"--chuckling again. "Asked your husband who you were, and so on. I hope you are enjoying yourself. Seen everything, eh? The houses are pretty good this year."

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"Lord Alfred has just shown them to me. They are quite too exquisite," says Georgie.

"And the lake, and my new swans?"

"No; not the swans."

"Dear me! why didn't he show you those? Finest birds I ever saw. My dear Mrs. Branscombe, you really must see them, you know."

"I should like to, if you will show them to me," says the little hypocrite, with the very faintest, but the most successful, emphasis on the pronoun, which is wine to the heart of the old beau; and, offering her his arm, he takes her across the lawn and through the shrubberies to the sheet of water beyond, that gleams sweet and cool throw; the foliage. As they go, the county turns to regard them; and men wonder who the pretty woman is the old fellow has picked up; and women wonder what on earth the duke can see in that silly little Mrs. Branscombe.

Sir James, who has been watching the duke's evident admiration for his pretty guest, is openly amused.

"Your training!" he says to Clarissa, over whose chair he is leaning. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself and your pupil. Such a disgraceful little coquette I never saw. I really pity that poor duchess: see there, how miserably unhappy she is looking, and how-er--pink."

"Don't be unkind: your hesitation was positively cruel. The word `red' is unmistakably the word for the poor duchess to-day."

"Well, yes, and yesterday, and the day before, and probably to-morrow," says Sir James, mildly. "But I really wonder at the duke,--at his time of life, too! If I were Branscombe I should feel it my duty to interfere."

He is talking gayly, unceasingly, but always with his grave eyes fixed upon Clarissa, as she leans back languidly on the uncomfortable garden-chair, smiling indeed every now and then, but fitfully, and without the gladness that generally lights up her charming face.

Horace had promised to be here to-day,--had faithfully promised to come with her and her father to this garden-party; and where is he now? A little chill of disappointment has fallen upon her, and made dull her day. No smallest doubt of his truth finds harbor in her gentle bosom, | | 225 yet grief sits heavy on her, "as the mildews hang upon the bells of flowers to blight their bloom!"

Sir James, half divining the cause of her discontent, seeks carefully, tenderly, to draw her from her sad thoughts in every way that occurs to him; and his efforts, though not altogether crowned with success, are at least so far happy in that he induces her to forget her grievance for the time being, and keeps her from dwelling too closely upon the vexed question of her recreant lover.

To be with Sir James is, too, in itself a relief to her. With him she need not converse unless it so pleases her; her silence will neither surprise nor trouble him; but with all the others it would be so different: they would claim her attention whether she willed it or not, and to make ordinary spirited conversation just at this moment would be impossible to her. The smile dies off her face. A sigh replaces it.

"How well you are looking to-day!" says Scrope, lightly, thinking this will please her. She is extremely pale, but a little hectic spot, born of weariness and fruitless hoping against hope, betrays itself on either cheek. His tone, if not the words, does please her, it is so full of loving kindness.

"Am I?" she says. "I don't feel like looking well; and I am tired, too. They say,

I doubt mine is a sad one, I feel so worn out. Though,"--hastily, and with a vivid flush that changes all her pallor into warmth,--"if I were put to it, I couldn't tell you why."

"No? Do you know I--have often felt like that," says Scrope, carelessly. "It is both strange and natural. One has fits of depression that come and go at will, and that one cannot account for; at least, I have, frequently. But you, Clarissa, you should not know what depression means."

"I know it to day." For the moment her courage fails her. She feels weak; a craving for sympathy overcomes her; and, turning, she lifts her large sorrowful eyes to his.

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She would, perhaps, have spoken; but now a scree of shame and a sharp pang that means pride come to her, and, by a supreme effort, she conquers emotion, and lets her heavily-lashed lids fall over her suffused eyes, as though to conceal the tell-tale drops within from his searching gaze.

"So, you see,"--she says, with a rather artificial laugh,--"your flattery falls through: with all this weight of imaginary woe upon my shoulders, I can hardly be looking my best."

"Nevertheless, I shall not allow you to call my true sentiments flattery," says Scrope: "I really meant what I said, whether you choose to believe me or not. Yours is a

"What a courtier you become!" she says, laughing honestly for almost the first time to-day. It is so strange to hear James Scrope say anything high-flown or sentimental. She is a little bit afraid that he knows why she is sorry, yet, after all, she hardly frets over the fact of his knowing. Dear Jim! he is always kind, and sweet, and thoughtful! Even if he does understand, he is quite safe to look as if he didn't. And that is always such a comfort!

And Sir James, watching her, and marking the grief upon her face, feels a tightening at his heart, and a longing to succor her, and to go forth--if need be--and fight for her as did the knights of old for those they loved, until "just and mightie death, whom none can advise," enfolded him in his arms.

For long time he has loved her,--has lived with only her image in his heart. Yet what has his devotion gained him? Her liking, her regard, no doubt, but nothing that can satisfy the longing that leaves desolate his faithful heart. Regard, however deep, is but small comfort to him whose every thought, waking and sleeping, belongs alone to her.

He is quite assured she lives in utter ignorance of his love. No word has escaped him, no smallest hint, that might declare to her the passion that daily, hourly, grows stronger, and of which she is the sole object. "The noblest mind the best contentment has," and he contents himself as best he may on a smile here, a gentle word there, a kindly pressure of the hand to-day, a look of welcome to-morrow. These are liberally given, but nothing more. Ever since her engagement to Horace Branscombe he has, of course, relinquished hope; but the surrender of all expectation has not killed his love. He is silent because he must be so, but his heart wakes, and

"See, there they are again," he says now, alluding to Georgie and her ducal companion, as they emerge from behind some thick shrubs. Another man is with them, too,--a tall, gaunt young man, with long hair, and a cadaverous face, who is staring at Georgie as though he would willingly devour her--but only in the interest of art. He is lecturing on the "Consummate Daffodil," and is comparing it unfavorably with the "Unutterable Tulip," and is plainly boring the two, with whom he is walking, to extinction. He is Sir John Lincoln, that old-new friend of Georgie's, and will not be shaken off.

"Long ago," says Georgie, tearfully, to herself, "he was not an æsthete. Oh, how I wish he would go back to his pristine freshness!"

But he won't: he maunders on unceasingly about impossible flowers, that are all very well in their way, but whose exaltedness lives only in his own imagination, until the duke, growing weary (as well he might, poor soul), turns aside, and greets with unexpected cordiality a group upon his right, that, under any other less oppressive circumstances, would be abhorrent to him. But to spend a long hour talking about one lily is not to be borne.

Georgie follows his example, and tries to escape Lincoln | | 228 and the tulips by diving among the aforesaid group. She is very successful,--groups do not suit aesthetics,-and soon the gaunt young man takes himself, and his long hair, to some remote region.

"How d'ye do, Mrs. Branscombe?" says a voice at her elbow, a moment later, and, turning, she finds herself face to face with Mr. Kennedy.

"Ah! you?" she says, with very flattering haste, being unmistakably pleased to see him. "I had no idea you were staying in the country."

"I am staying with the Luttrells'. Molly asked me down last month."

"She is a great friend of yours, I know," says Mrs. Branscombe; "yet I hadn't the faintest notion I should meet you here to-day."

"And you didn't care either, I dare say," says Mr. Kennedy, in a tone that is positively sepulchral, and, considering all things, very well done indeed.

"I should have cared, if I had even once thought about it," says Mrs. Branscombe, cheerfully.

Whereupon he says,--

"Thank you!" in a voice that is all reproach.

Georgie colors. "I didn't mean what you think," she says, anxiously. "I didn't indeed."

"Well, it sounded exactly like it," says Mr. Kennedy, with careful gloom. "Of course it is not to be expected that you ever would think of me, but----I haven't seen you since that last night at Gowran, have I?"

"No."

"I think you might have told me then you were going to be married."

"I wasn't going to be married then," says Georgie, indignantly: "I hadn't a single idea of it. Never thought of it, until the next day."

"I quite thought you were going to marry me," says Mr. Kennedy, sadly; "I had quite made up my mind to it. I never"-forlornly--"imagined you as belonging to any other fellow. It isn't pleasant to find that one's pet doll is stuffed with sawdust, and yet----"

"I can't think what you are talking about," says Mrs. Branscombe, coldly, and with some fine disgust; she cannot help thinking that she must be the doll in question, | | 229 and to be filled with sawdust sounds anything but dignified.

Kennedy, reading her like a book, nobly suppresses a wild desire for laughter, and goes on in a tone, if possible, more depressed than the former one.

"My insane hope was the doll," he says: "it proved only dust. I haven't got over the shock yet that I felt on hearing of your marriage. I don't suppose I ever shall now."

"Nonsense!" says Georgie, contemptuously. "I never saw you look so well in all my life. You are positively fat."

"That's how it always shows with me," says Kennedy, unblushingly. "Whenever green and yellow melancholy marks me for its own, I sit on a monument (they always keep one for me at home) and smile incessantly at grief, and get as fat as possible. It is a refinement of cruelty, you know, as superfluous flesh is not a thing to be hankered after."

"How you must have fretted," says Mrs. Branscombe, demurely, glancing from under her long lashes at his figure, which has certainly gained both in size and in weight since their last meeting.

At this they both laugh.

"Is your husband here to-day?" asks he, presently. "Yes."

"Why isn't he with you?"

"He has found somebody more to his fancy, perhaps."

As she says this she glances round, as though for the first time alive to the fact that indeed he is not beside her.

"Impossible!" says Kennedy. "Give any other reason but that, and I may believe you. I am quite sure he is missing you terribly, and is vainly searching every nook and corner by this time for your dead body. No doubt he fears the worst. If you were my----I mean if ever I were to marry (which of course is quite out of the question now), I shouldn't let my wife out of my sight."

"Poor woman! what a time she is going to put in!" says Mrs. Branscombe, pityingly. "Don't go about telling people all that, or you will never get a wife. By this time Dorian and I have made the discovery that we can do excellently well without each other sometimes."

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Dorian coming up behind her just as she says this, hears her, and changes color.

"How d'ye do!" he says to Kennedy, civilly, if not cordially, that young man receiving his greeting with the utmost bonhommie and an unchanging front.

For a second, Branscombe refuses to meet his wife's eyes, then, conquering the momentary feeling of pained disappointment, he turns to her, and says, gently,--

"Do you care to stay much longer? Clarissa has gone, and Scrope, and the Carringtons."

"I don't care to stay another minute: I should like to go home now," says Georgie, slipping her hand through his arm, as though glad to have something to lean on; and, as she speaks, she lifts her face and bestows upon him a small smile. It is a very dear little smile, and has the effect of restoring him to perfect happiness again.

Seeing which, Kennedy raises his brows, and then his hat, and, bowing, turns aside, and is soon lost amidst the crowd.

"You are sure you want to come home?" says Dorian, anxiously. "I am not in a hurry, you know."

"I am. I have walked enough, and talked enough, to last me a month."

"I am afraid I rather broke in upon your conversation just now," says Branscombe, looking earnestly at her. "But for my coming, Kennedy would have stayed on with you; and he is a-a rather amusing sort of fellow, isn't he?"

"Is he? He was exceedingly stupid to-day, at all events. I don't believe he has a particle of brains, or else he thinks other people haven't. I enjoyed myself a great deal more with the old duke, until that ridiculous Sir John Lincoln came to us. I don't think he knew a bit who the duke was, because he kept saying odd little things about the grounds and the guests, right under his nose; at least, right behind his back: it is all the same thing."

"What is? His nose and his back?" asks Dorian; at which piece of folly they both laugh as though it was the best thing in the world.

Then they make their way over the smooth lawns, and past the glowing flower-beds, and past Sir John Lincoln, | | 231 too, who is standing in an impossible attitude, that makes him all elbows and knees, talking to a very splendid young man-all bone and muscle and good humor--who is plainly delighted with him. To the splendid young man he is nothing but one vast joke.

Seeing Mrs. Branscombe, they both raise their hats, and Sir John so far forgets the tulips as to give it as his opinion that she is "Quite too, too intense for every-day life." Whereupon the splendid young man, breaking into praise too, declares she is "Quite too awfully jolly, don't you know," which commonplace remark so horrifies his companion that he sadly and tearfully turns aside, and leaves him to his fate.

Georgie, who has been brought to a standstill for a moment, hears both remarks, and laughs aloud.

"It is something to be admired by Colonel Vibart, isn't it?" she says to Dorian; "but it is really very sad about poor Sir John. He has bulbous roots on the brain, and they have turned him as mad as a hatter."