"Do you know where they went? Robert was not sure when he left Scotland."
"I think I do, Mrs. Campbell. They had intended going through the Fife towns, and by old St. Andrews to Wick, and so to the Orkneys and Shetlands. But it was late in the season for this trip, so they went to Paris and the Mediterranean. I think they were right."
"Paris, of course. All the fools go there!"
"Well, Mrs. Campbell, Scotland is a bleak place for a honeymoon."
"Mr. St. Claire, if it does for a man's home, it may do to honeymoon in. That is my opinion."
"I don't agree with you, Mrs. Campbell. A honeymoon is a sort of transcendental existence, and a man naturally wants to spend it as nearly in Paradise as possible. There's no place like the Mediterranean for sunshine, and it is poetical and picturesque, and just the place for lovers."
Failing, with all his willing good nature, to rouse any apparent interest in a subject he considered highly interesting, he felt a little offended, and rose to depart. But ere he reached the parlor door he turned and said: "I had nearly forgotten one very remarkable thing about the bride."
"Let us hear it, by all means," said Mrs. Campbell.
"I stayed a few days after the marriage, in order to visit Windermere and Keswick Lake with Mr. Newton—by-the-by, wonderfully beautiful spots, nothing like them in Scotland—and one day while waiting in his study, I picked up a book. Imagine my astonishment, when I saw it had been written by the bride."
At this information Mrs. Campbell threw up her hands with a laugh that terminated in something like a shriek. Isabel laid her hand on her mother's arm, and asked: "Are you ill, mother?"