'Mine are only confused lights since Lance brought his Daisy to see me on their way to the sands by St. Kitt's Head. What a fresh pleasant face it is! and with a spice of originality in it, too.'

'Commend me to the elder sister's. Leonard Ward had prepared me for it, when I met him circulating among the unhappy deported Melanesians in Queensland. I believe she was the making of him, and a noble work he is.'

'Come, I can't let you go back to the Antipodes. Miss May was abroad at that time, and plans were not in the least fixed, only that Lance should not give up the retail business.'

'No, he said very justly, that if he did so, Mrs. Lamb would never be contented without her husband doing the same, and that would be destruction. When I went down to the S.P.G. meeting at Bexley, I saw a good deal how the land lay, and found that all the neighbours were quite ready to visit Lance's wife, and she will live at Marshlands in a very different style from the old times we remember. I am afraid Mrs. Lamb will be a trial, but she is prepared for that.'

'It was an excellent plan to have the weddings together at Stoneborough. They could hardly have borne another here.'

'No. There was a proposal that Will and Robina should be married at Minsterham, but they rather shrank from that, and the De la Poers wrote urgently to persuade her to have the wedding at Repworth, but she saw he disliked it, and then Miss May came forward and undertook to manage it all, "being inured to such affairs," as she put it; but there was an old promise in an unguarded moment that all their young Ladyships should be bridesmaids, and they held to it: so Lord and Lady De la Poer brought a bevy of daughters to the Swan at Stoneborough, and you had better be prepared, for they are coming to see Vale Leston to-morrow, and probably will come on here. Nice people, exceedingly fond of Robina. I never saw such loads of wedding presents. Lady Caergwent gives a great Russian samovar, labelled for "school feasts."'

'I suppose Fernan—I beg his pardon, Mr. Travis Underwood—did not give another diamond bouquet.'

'No. The common sense keeping he has got into showed itself in the choice of all the household plate, just the same, for each of the couples.'

'And Angela was not there, I know. Our Mother wrote to me that the poor child was so distressed at the notion of going that as they did not make a point of it, she thought it better not to send her. I think she will soon be allowed to become a postulant. It seems evidently the life she needs. But who were Miss May's bridesmaids?'

'She set her face against any but her sister and Geraldine—would hear of no one else, though Cherry had always avoided it before. They called themselves the elderly bridesmaids. What! does the conventual mind require to know what they wore? Not the same as Robina's, who had white and blue ribbons; but they were in—what do you call it?—a Frenchified name for some kind of purple.'