A few tears gathered in her eyes, and dropped over her cheeks slowly as she paused and waited for his answer. He did not utter a word. At the beginning of her reply he had moved the hand on which his head rested, so that it hid his face. I saw nothing but the upper part of his figure at the table. Not a muscle of him moved. The fingers of the hand which supported his head were dented deep in his hair. They might have expressed hidden anger or hidden grief it was hard to say which there was no significant trembling in them. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to tell the secret of his thoughts at that moment the moment which was the crisis of his life and the crisis of hers.
I was determined to make him declare himself, for Laura's sake.
'Sir Percival!' I interposed sharply, 'have you nothing to say when my sister has said so much? More, in my opinion,' I added, my unlucky temper getting the better of me, 'than any man alive, in your position, has a right to hear from her.'
That last rash sentence opened a way for him by which to escape me if he chose, and he instantly took advantage of it.
'Pardon me, Miss Halcombe,' he said, still keeping his hand over his face, 'pardon me if I remind you that I have claimed no such right.'
The few plain words which would have brought him back to the point from which he had wandered were just on my lips, when Laura checked me by speaking again.
'I hope I have not made my painful acknowledgment in vain,' she continued. 'I hope it has secured me your entire confidence in what I have still to say?'
'Pray be assured of it.' He made that brief reply warmly, dropping his hand on the table while he spoke, and turning towards us again. Whatever outward change had passed over him was gone now. His face was eager and expectant it expressed nothing but the most intense anxiety to hear her next words.
'I wish you to understand that I have not spoken from any selfish motive,' she said. 'If you leave me, Sir Percival, after what you have just heard, you do not leave me to marry another man, you only allow me to remain a single woman for the rest of my life. My fault towards you has begun and ended in my own thoughts. It can never go any farther. No word has passed -' She hesitated, in doubt about the expression she should use next, hesitated in a momentary confusion which it was very sad and very painful to see. 'No word has passed,' she patiently and resolutely resumed, 'between myself and the person to whom I am now referring for the first and last time in your presence of my feelings towards him, or of his feelings towards me no word ever can pass neither he nor I are likely, in this world, to meet again. I earnestly beg you to spare me from saying any more, and to believe me, on my word, in what I have just told you. It is the truth, Sir Percival, the truth which I think my promised husband has a claim to hear, at any sacrifice of my own feelings. I trust to his generosity to pardon me, and to his honour to keep my secret.'
'Both those trusts are sacred to me,' he said, 'and both shall be sacredly kept.'
After answering in those terms he paused, and looked at her as if he was waiting to hear more.
'I have said all I wish to say,' she added quietly 'I have said more than enough to justify you in withdrawing from your engagement.'
'You have said more than enough,' he answered, 'to make it the dearest object of my life to keep the engagement.' With those words he rose from his chair, and advanced a few steps towards the place where she was sitting.
She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her. Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had dreaded this from the first. I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so. I even waited and watched now, when the harm was done, for a word from Sir Percival that would give me the opportunity of putting him in the wrong.
'You have left it to me, Miss Fairlie, to resign you,' he continued. 'I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has just shown herself to be the noblest of her sex.'
He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate enthusiasm, and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised her head, flushed up a little, and looked at him with sudden animation and spirit.
'No!' she said firmly. 'The most wretched of her sex, if she must give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love.'
'May she not give it in the future,' he asked, 'if the one object of her husband's life is to deserve it?'
'Never!' she answered. 'If you still persist in maintaining our engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival your loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!'
She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her. I tried hard to feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so, but my womanhood would pity him, in spite of myself.
'I gratefully accept your faith and truth,' he said. 'The least that you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from any other woman in the world.'
Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly at her side. He raised it gently to his lips touched it with them, rather than kissed it bowed to me and then, with perfect delicacy and discretion, silently quitted the room.
She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone she sat by me, cold and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was hopeless and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to me in silence. We remained together so for what seemed a long and weary time so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and spoke to her softly, in the hope of producing a change.
The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness. She suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.
'I must submit, Marian, as well as I can,' she said. 'My new life has its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day.'
As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked the drawer and brought the key to me.
'I must part from everything that reminds me of him,' she said. 'Keep the key wherever you please I shall never want it again.'
Before I could say a word she had turned away to her bookcase, and had taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright's drawings. She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her hands then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.
'Oh, Laura! Laura!' I said, not angrily, not reprovingly with nothing but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart.
'It is the last time, Marian,' she pleaded. 'I am bidding it good-bye for ever.'
She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders, and dropped round her, far below her waist. She separated one long, thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album. The moment it was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.
'You write to him and he writes to you,' she said. 'While I am alive, if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am unhappy. Don't distress him, Marian, for my sake, don't distress him. If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my own hands. And say oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself say I loved him!'
She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She broke from me with hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot.
I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her she was past being soothed, and past being reasoned with. It was the sad, sudden end for us two of this memorable day. When the fit had worn itself out she was too exhausted to speak. She slumbered towards the afternoon, and I put away the book of drawings so that she might not see it when she woke. My face was calm, whatever my heart might be, when she opened her eyes again and looked at me. We said no more to each other about the distressing interview of the morning. Sir Percival's name was not mentioned. Walter Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us for the remainder of the day.
10th. Finding that she was composed and like herself this morning, I returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the sole purpose of imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and Mr. Fairlie, more plainly and strongly than she could speak to either of them herself, about this lamentable marriage. She interposed, gently but firmly, in the middle of my remonstrances.
'I left yesterday to decide,' she said; 'and yesterday has decided. It is too late to go back.'
Sir Percival spoke to me this afternoon about what had passed in Laura's room. He assured me that the unparalleled trust she had placed in him had awakened such an answering conviction of her innocence and integrity in his mind, that he was guiltless of having felt even a moment's unworthy jealousy, either at the time when he was in her presence, or afterwards when he had withdrawn from it. Deeply as he lamented the unfortunate attachment which had hindered the progress he might otherwise have made in her esteem and regard, he firmly believed that it had remained unacknowledged in the past, and that it would remain, under all changes of circumstance which it was possible to contemplate, unacknowledged in the future. This was his absolute conviction; and the strongest proof he could give of it was the assurance, which he now offered, that he felt no curiosity to know whether the attachment was of recent date or not, or who had been the object of it. His implicit confidence in Miss Fairlie made him satisfied with what she had thought fit to say to him, and he was honestly innocent of the slightest feeling of anxiety to hear more.
He waited after saying those words and looked at me. I was so conscious of my unreasonable prejudice against him so conscious of an unworthy suspicion that he might be speculating on my impulsively answering the very questions which he had just described himself as resolved not to ask that I evaded all reference to this part of the subject with something like a feeling of confusion on my own part. At the same time I was resolved not to lose even the smallest opportunity of trying to plead Laura's cause, and I told him boldly that I regretted his generosity had not carried him one step farther, and induced him to withdraw from the engagement altogether.
Here, again, he disarmed me by not attempting to defend himself. He would merely beg me to remember the difference there was between his allowing Miss Fairlie to give him up, which was a matter of submission only, and his forcing himself to give up Miss Fairlie, which was, in other words, asking him to be the suicide of his own hopes. Her conduct of the day before had so strengthened the unchangeable love and admiration of two long years, that all active contention against those feelings, on his part, was henceforth entirely out of his power. I must think him weak, selfish, unfeeling towards the very woman whom he idolised, and he must bow to my opinion as resignedly as he could only putting it to me, at the same time, whether her future as a single woman, pining under an unhappily placed attachment which she could never acknowledge, could be said to promise her a much brighter prospect than her future as the wife of a man who worshipped the very ground she walked on? In the last case there was hope from time, however slight it might be in the first case, on her own showing, there was no hope at all.
I answered him more because my tongue is a woman's, and must answer, than because I had anything convincing to say. It was only too plain that the course Laura had adopted the day before had offered him the advantage if he chose to take it and that he had chosen to take it. I felt this at the time, and I feel it just as strongly now, while I write these lines, in my own room. The one hope left is that his motives really spring, as he says they do, from the irresistible strength of his attachment to Laura.
Before I close my diary for to-night I must record that I wrote to-day, in poor Hartright's interest, to two of my mother's old friends in London both men of influence and position. If they can do anything for him, I am quite sure they will. Except Laura, I never was more anxious about any one than I am now about Walter. All that has happened since he left us has only increased my strong regard and sympathy for him. I hope I am doing right in trying to help him to employment abroad I hope, most earnestly and anxiously, that it will end well.
11th. Sir Percival had an interview with Mr. Fairlie, and I was sent for to join them.
I found Mr. Fairlie greatly relieved at the prospect of the 'family worry' (as he was pleased to describe his niece's marriage) being settled at last. So far, I did not feel called on to say anything to him about my own opinion, but when he proceeded, in his most aggravatingly languid manner, to suggest that the time for the marriage had better be settled next, in accordance with Sir Percival's wishes, I enjoyed the satisfaction of assailing Mr. Fairlie's nerves with as strong a protest against hurrying Laura's decision as I could put into words. Sir Percival immediately assured me that he felt the force of my objection, and begged me to believe that the proposal had not been made in consequence of any interference on his part. Mr. Fairlie leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, said we both of us did honour to human nature, and then repeated his suggestion as coolly as if neither Sir Percival nor I had said a word in opposition to it. It ended in my flatly declining to mention the subject to Laura, unless she first approached it of her own accord. I left the room at once after making that declaration. Sir Percival looked seriously embarrassed and distressed, Mr. Fairlie stretched out his lazy legs on his velvet footstool, and said, 'Dear Marian! how I envy you your robust nervous system! Don't bang the door!'
On going to Laura's room I found that she had asked for me, and that Mrs. Vesey had informed her that I was with Mr. Fairlie. She inquired at once what I had been wanted for, and I told her all that had passed, without attempting to conceal the vexation and annoyance that I really felt. Her answer surprised and distressed me inexpressibly it was the very last reply that I should have expected her to make.
'My uncle is right,' she said. 'I have caused trouble and anxiety enough to you, and to all about me. Let me cause no more, Marian let Sir Percival decide.'
I remonstrated warmly, but nothing that I could say moved her.
'I am held to my engagement,' she replied; 'I have broken with my old life. The evil day will not come the less surely because I put it off. No, Marian! once again my uncle is right. I have caused trouble enough and anxiety enough, and I will cause no more.'
She used to be pliability itself, but she was now inflexibly passive in her resignation I might almost say in her despair. Dearly as I love her, I should have been less pained if she had been violently agitated it was so shockingly unlike her natural character to see her as cold and insensible as I saw her now.
12th. Sir Percival put some questions to me at breakfast about Laura, which left me no choice but to tell him what she had said.
While we were talking she herself came down and joined us. She was just as unnaturally composed in Sir Percival's presence as she had been in mine. When breakfast was over he had an opportunity of saying a few words to her privately, in a recess of one of the windows. They were not more than two or three minutes together, and on their separating she left the room with Mrs. Vesey, while Sir Percival came to me. He said he had entreated her to favour him by maintaining her privilege of fixing the time for the marriage at her own will and pleasure. In reply she had merely expressed her acknowledgments, and had desired him to mention what his wishes were to Miss Halcombe.
I have no patience to write more. In this instance, as in every other, Sir Percival has carried his point with the utmost possible credit to himself, in spite of everything that I can say or do. His wishes are now, what they were, of course, when he first came here; and Laura having resigned herself to the one inevitable sacrifice of the marriage, remains as coldly hopeless and enduring as ever. In parting with the little occupations and relics that reminded her of Hartright, she seems to have parted with all her tenderness and all her impressibility. It is only three o'clock in the afternoon while I write these lines, and Sir Percival has left us already, in the happy hurry of a bridegroom to prepare for the bride's reception at his house in Hampshire. Unless some extraordinary event happens to prevent it they will be married exactly at the time when he wished to be married before the end of the year. My very fingers burn as I write it!
13th. A sleepless night, through uneasiness about Laura. Towards the morning I came to a resolution to try what change of scene would do to rouse her. She cannot surely remain in her present torpor of insensibility, if I take her away from Limmeridge and surround her with the pleasant faces of old friends? After some consideration I decided on writing to the Arnolds, in Yorkshire. They are simple, kind-hearted, hospitable people, and she has known them from her childhood. When I had put the letter in the post-bag I told her what I had done. It would have been a relief to me if she had shown the spirit to resist and object. But no she only said, 'I will go anywhere with you, Marian. I dare say you are right I dare say the change will do me good.'
14th. I wrote to Mr. Gilmore, informing him that there was really a prospect of this miserable marriage taking place, and also mentioning my idea of trying what change of scene would do for Laura. I had no heart to go into particulars. Time enough for them when we get nearer to the end of the year.
15th. Three letters for me. The first, from the Arnolds, full of delight at the prospect of seeing Laura and me. The second, from one of the gentlemen to whom I wrote on Walter Hartright's behalf, informing me that he has been fortunate enough to find an opportunity of complying with my request. The third, from Walter himself, thanking me, poor fellow, in the warmest terms, for giving him an opportunity of leaving his home, his country, and his friends. A private expedition to make excavations among the ruined cities of Central America is, it seems, about to sail from Liverpool. The draughtsman who had been already appointed to accompany it has lost heart, and withdrawn at the eleventh hour, and Walter is to fill his place. He is to be engaged for six months certain, from the time of the landing in Honduras, and for a year afterwards, if the excavations are successful, and if the funds hold out. His letter ends with a promise to write me a farewell line when they are all on board ship, and when the pilot leaves them. I can only hope and pray earnestly that he and I are both acting in this matter for the best. It seems such a serious step for him to take, that the mere contemplation of it startles me. And yet, in his unhappy position, how can I expect him or wish him to remain at home?
16th. The carriage is at the door. Laura and I set out on our visit to the Arnolds to-day.
POLESDEAN LODGE, YORKSHIRE.
23rd. A week in these new scenes and among these kind-hearted people has done her some good, though not so much as I had hoped. I have resolved to prolong our stay for another week at least. It is useless to go back to Limmeridge till there is an absolute necessity for our return.
24th. Sad news by this morning's post. The expedition to Central America sailed on the twenty-first. We have parted with a true man we have lost a faithful friend. Walter Hartright has left England.
25th. Sad news yesterday ominous news to-day. Sir Percival Glyde has written to Mr. Fairlie, and Mr. Fairlie has written to Laura and me, to recall us to Limineridge immediately.
What can this mean? Has the day for the marriage been fixed in our absence?
II.
LIMMERIDGE HOUSE.
November 27th. My forebodings are realised. The marriage is fixed for the twenty-second of December.
The day after we left for Polesdean Lodge Sir Percival wrote, it seems, to Mr. Fairlie, to say that the necessary repairs and alterations in his house in Hampshire would occupy a much longer time in completion than he had originally anticipated. The proper estimates were to be submitted to him as soon as possible, and it would greatly facilitate his entering into definite arrangements with the workpeople, if he could be informed of the exact period at which the wedding ceremony might be expected to take place. He could then make all his calculations in reference to time, besides writing the necessary apologies to friends who had been engaged to visit him that winter, and who could not, of course, be received when the house was in the hands of the workmen.
To this letter Mr. Fairlie had replied by requesting Sir Percival himself to suggest a day for the marriage, subject to Miss Fairlie's approval, which her guardian willingly undertook to do his best to obtain. Sir Percival wrote back by the next post, and proposed (in accordance with his own views and wishes from the first) the latter part of December perhaps the twenty-second, or twenty-fourth, or any other day that the lady and her guardian might prefer. The lady not being at hand to speak for herself, her guardian had decided, in her absence, on the earliest day mentioned the twenty-second of December, and had written to recall us to Limineridge in consequence.
After explaining these particulars to me at a private interview yesterday, Mr. Fairlie suggested, in his most amiable manner, that I should open the necessary negotiations to-day. Feeling that resistance was useless, unless I could first obtain Laura's authority to make it, I consented to speak to her, but declared, at the same time, that I would on no consideration undertake to gain her consent to Sir Percival's wishes. Mr. Fairlie complimented me on my 'excellent conscience,' much as he would have complimented me, if he had been out walking, on my 'excellent constitution,' and seemed perfectly satisfied, so far, with having simply shifted one more family responsibility from his own shoulders to mine.
This morning I spoke to Laura as I had promised. The composure I may almost say, the insensibility which she has so strangely and so resolutely maintained ever since Sir Percival left us, was not proof against the shock of the news I had to tell her. She turned pale and trembled violently.
'Not so soon!' she pleaded. 'Oh, Marian, not so soon!'
The slightest hint she could give was enough for me. I rose to leave the room, and fight her battle for her at once with Mr. Fairlie.
Just as my hand was on the door, she caught fast hold of my dress and stopped me.
'Let me go!' I said. 'My tongue burns to tell your uncle that he and Sir Percival are not to have it all their own way.'
She sighed bitterly, and still held my dress.
'No!' she said faintly. 'Too late, Marian, too late!'
'Not a minute too late,' I retorted. 'The question of time is our question and trust me, Laura, to take a woman's full advantage of it.'
I unclasped her hand from my gown while I spoke; but she slipped both her arms round my waist at the same moment, and held me more effectually than ever.
'It will only involve us in more trouble and more confusion,' she said. 'It will set you and my uncle at variance, and bring Sir Percival here again with fresh causes of complaint -'
'So much the better!' I cried out passionately. 'Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return? Let me go, Laura I'm mad when I think of it!'
The tears miserable, weak, women's tears of vexation and rage started to my eyes. She smiled sadly, and put her handkerchief over my face to hide for me the betrayal of my own weakness the weakness of all others which she knew that I most despised.
'Oh, Marian!' she said. 'You crying! Think what you would say to me, if the places were changed, and if those tears were mine. All your love and courage and devotion will not alter what must happen, sooner or later. Let my uncle have his way. Let us have no more troubles and heart-burnings that any sacrifice of mine can prevent. Say you will live with me, Marian, when I am married and say no more.'
But I did say more. I forced back the contemptible tears that were no relief to me, and that only distressed her, and reasoned and pleaded as calmly as I could. It was of no avail. She made me twice repeat the promise to live with her when she was married, and then suddenly asked a question which turned my sorrow and my sympathy for her into a new direction.
'While we were at Polesdean,' she said, 'you had a letter, Marian -'
Her altered tone the abrupt manner in which she looked away from me and hid her face on my shoulder the hesitation which silenced her before she had completed her question, all told me, but too plainly, to whom the half-expressed inquiry pointed.
'I thought, Laura, that you and I were never to refer to him again,' I said gently.
'You had a letter from him?' she persisted.
'Yes,' I replied, 'if you must know it.'
'Do you mean to write to him again?'
I hesitated. I had been afraid to tell her of his absence from England, or of the manner in which my exertions to serve his new hopes and projects had connected me with his departure. What answer could I make? He was gone where no letters could reach him for months, perhaps for years, to come.
'Suppose I do mean to write to him again,' I said at last. 'What then, Laura?'
Her cheek grew burning hot against my neck, and her arms trembled and tightened round me.
'Don't tell him about the twenty-second,' she whispered. 'Promise, Marian pray promise you will not even mention my name to him when you write next.'
I gave the promise. No words can say how sorrowfully I gave it. She instantly took her arm from my waist, walked away to the window, and stood looking out with her back to me. After a moment she spoke once more, but without turning round, without allowing me to catch the smallest glimpse of her face.
'Are you going to my uncle's room?' she asked. 'Will you say that I consent to whatever arrangement he may think best? Never mind leaving me, Marian. I shall be better alone for a little while.'
I went out. If, as soon as I got into the passage, I could have transported Mr. Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde to the uttermost ends of the earth by lifting one of my fingers, that finger would have been raised without an instant's hesitation. For once my unhappy temper now stood my friend. I should have broken down altogether and burst into a violent fit of crying, if my tears had not been all burnt up in the heat of my anger. As it was, I dashed into Mr. Fairlie's room called to him as harshly as possible, 'Laura consents to the twenty-second' and dashed out again without waiting for a word of answer. I banged the door after me, and I hope I shattered Mr. Fairlie's nervous system for the rest of the day.
28th. This morning I read poor Hartright's farewell letter over again, a doubt having crossed my mind since yesterday, whether I am acting wisely in concealing the fact of his departure from Laura.
On reflection, I still think I am right. The allusions in his letter to the preparations made for the expedition to Central America, all show that the leaders of it know it to be dangerous. If the discovery of this makes me uneasy, what would it make her? It is bad enough to feel that his departure has deprived us of the friend of all others to whose devotion we could trust in the hour of need, if ever that hour comes and finds us helpless; but it is far worse to know that he has gone from us to face the perils of a bad climate, a wild country, and a disturbed population. Surely it would be a cruel candour to tell Laura this, without a pressing and a positive necessity for it?
I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the letter at once, for fear of its one day falling into wrong hands. It not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret for ever between the writer and me, but it reiterates his suspicion so obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming that he has been secretly watched since he left Limmeridge. He declares that he saw the faces of the two strange men who followed him about the streets of London, watching him among the crowd which gathered at Liverpool to see the expedition embark, and he positively asserts that he heard the name of Anne Catherick pronounced behind him as he got into the boat. His own words are, 'These events have a meaning, these events must lead to a result. The mystery of Anne Catherick is not cleared up yet. She may never cross my path again, but if ever she crosses yours, make better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it. I speak on strong conviction I entreat you to remember what I say.' These are his own expressions. There is no danger of my forgetting them my memory is only too ready to dwell on any words of Hartright's that refer to Anne Catherick. But there is danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill I may die. Better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.
It is burnt. The ashes of his farewell letter the last he may ever write to me lie in a few black fragments on the hearth. Is this the sad end to all that sad story? Oh, not the end surely, surely not the end already!
29th. The preparations for the marriage have begun. The dressmaker has come to receive her orders. Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly careless about the question of all others in which a woman's personal interests are most closely bound up. She has left it all to the dressmaker and to me. If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the husband of her father's choice, how differently she would have behaved! How anxious and capricious she would have been, and what a hard task the best of dressmakers would have found it to please her!
30th. We hear every day from Sir Percival. The last news is that the alterations in his house will occupy from four to six months before they can be properly completed. If painters, paperhangers, and upholsterers could make happiness as well as splendour, I should be interested about their proceedings in Laura's future home. As it is, the only part of Sir Percival's last letter which does not leave me as it found me, perfectly indifferent to all his plans and projects, is the part which refers to the wedding tour. He proposes, as Laura is delicate, and as the winter threatens to be unusually severe, to take her to Rome, and to remain in Italy until the early part of next summer. If this plan should not be approved, he is equally ready, although he has no establishment of his own in town, to spend the season in London, in the most suitable furnished house that can be obtained for the purpose.