"It's wonderful how Sir Cyril is altered. I wouldn't have believed it—after less than two years and a half. Why, he looks positively ten years older, I do declare, Mabel; and he's bigger, and stouter, and regularly burnt brown, and he's grown a moustache, and his voice is deeper too. He's nothing like as pretty as he was. I always did say he was the prettiest boy, with the loveliest manner—but then, of course, he can't be a boy always, don't you know, and he's got nice manners still. You can fancy how he's changed, for Jean herself didn't know him when she first saw him in the dark. But if Jean likes him better so, it's all right; and she says she does."
"As for Mr. Trevelyan, he looks quite young and strong again, and he goes striding about like a great long-legged emu!"
"And we're to lose Mr. James Trevelyan! That seems a shame, and I'm desperately sorry—though to be sure the Colonel does say he's not at all a safe young man, and poor dear Thomas shakes his head. But some people always shake their heads over everybody, don't you know; and there's nobody I'd rather hear preach; only, of course, you mustn't tell Thomas! But it does give one a sort of lift—up out of the mud, you know."
"Mrs. Trevelyan? Oh, she's to spend half the year in London with them—and half the year at the Brow. That's the plan, I'm told. She says she's so glad for 'dear Jem' she always calls him 'Dear Jem,' you know—that she can't think of herself. And Mr. James Trevelyan is all beaming, and Mrs. Villiers looks as young and lovely as she did at sixteen.
"Poor dear creatures! They all think everything is to keep straight after marriage. A sort of comfortable wind-up, don't you see, and nothing ever to go wrong again! Of course, it won't—I mean, of course it will—at least you know what I mean. Things will get crooked just as much as ever, and perhaps a lot more. Why, if nothing else happens, there's a husband to look after, and everybody knows what that means! If they don't, they soon will."
"Of course, they'll be awfully happy, dear, and it all fits in beautifully, and it's just exactly what one wishes. I always did say Mr. James Trevelyan was the right person for Mrs. Villiers; and Sir Cyril has been crazy after Jean ever since he wore knickerbockers. But, all the same, I suppose they'll have their needles and pins, like other folks. Married life isn't just nothing but plum-cake, you know."
Mrs. Kennedy's metaphors were apt to get mixed, but she smiled on in placid unconsciousness of the incongruity.
"Miss Moggridge says it's so wonderful how one event grows out of another; and I suppose it is; only it would be more wonderful still if they didn't. She's a queer sort of woman, Mabel—intellectual and all that!—but she's quite too much for me, don't you know? And she's going to live at Rome."
"So it's all settled; and now there's nothing to be done but to publish the banns, and to get the frocks and veils!"
THE END.