en Fouquet was
squandering a nation's revenues on lamps and fountains and venal
friends. Lady Mabel protested against all this fuss.

"Dear mamma, I would so much rather have been married quietly,' she
said.

"My dearest, it is all your papa's doing. He is so proud of you. And
then we have only one daughter; and she is not likely to be married
more than once, I hope. Why should we not have all our friends round us
at such a time?"

Mabel shrugged her shoulders, with an air of repugnance to all the
friends and all the fuss.

"Marriage is such a solemn act of one's life," she said. "It seems
dreadful that it should be performed in the midst of a gaping,
indifferent crowd."

"My love, there will not be a creature present who can feel indifferent
about your welfare," protested the devoted mother. "If our dear
Roderick had been a more distinguished person, your papa would have had
you married in Westminster Abbey. There of course there would have been
a crowd of idle spectators."

"Poor Roderick," sighed Mabel. "It is a pity he is so utterly aimless.
He might have made a career for himself by this time, if he had chosen."

"He will do something by-and-by, I daresay," said the Duchess,
excusingly. "You will be able to mould him as you like, pet."

"I have not found him particularly malleable hitherto," said Mabel.

The bride elect was out of spirits, and inclined to look despondently
upon life. She was suffering the bitter pain of disappointed hopes.
"The Tragedy of a Sceptic Soul," despite its depth of thought, its
exquisite typography and vellumlike paper, had been a dire and
irredeemable failure. The reviewers had ground the poor little
aristocratic butterfly to powder upon the wheel of ridicule. They had
anatomised Lady Mabel's involved sentences, and laughed at her erudite
phrases. Her mild adaptations of Greek thought and fancy had been found
out, and held up to contempt. Her petty plagiarisms from French and
German poets had been traced to their source. The whole work, no smooth
and neatly polished on the outside, had been turned the seamy side
without, and the knots and flaws and ravelled threads had been exposed
without pity.

Happily the book was anonymous: but Mabel writhed under the criticism.
There was the crushing disappointment of expectations that had soared
high as the topmost throne on Parnassus. She had a long way to descend.
And then there was the sickening certainty that in the eyes of her ow