ecently recover
from a nervous breakdown in less than a month,--but we'll take a few
days off now and then for excursions in the neighbourhood, and _then_,
darling, we come home by Paris! Food for the spirit, and food for the
flesh... _Nothing_ is more reviving than a becoming hat. We'll buy
hats, Cassandra, and be blowed to expense... What's the very most you
have ever spent on a hat?"

"I never have told, and I never will," Cassandra said firmly, "but it
had a real lace veil." She sighed with melancholy resignation.
"Somehow, Grizel, even hats lose their savour, when there's no one to
care..."

"Rubbish!" cried Grizel tersely, "and you know it. A woman buys hats to
please herself. Half the time her husband calls them `The Limit'! and
her friends wonder how she _can_, but so long as she and the mirror are
agreed, it doesn't make a rap of difference. She wears it to the end...
Cassandra, darling, I feel it in my bones that I'm going to find the
hat of my life! Oughtn't we to be dreadfully thankful that we go in for
different styles? All would be over between us, if we fell in love with
the same model!"

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE.

"IT'S JUST--LIFE!"

Grizel came slowly down the long, straight path leading from the convent
to the orchard wall, which marked the boundary of the grounds. It was a
high wall rising some eight or ten feet above the path, and serving as a
support for fruit trees, but at the farther end a sloping gangway of
grass led to a terraced walk from which a view could be obtained over
the low-lying country stretching towards the sea. On the terrace stood
Cassandra, her white figure strongly outlined against the blue of the
skies. She turned at her friend's approach, and beheld that in Grizel's
eyes which startled her into attention.

"You have something to tell me?"

"Yes!"

"What is it, Grizel?"

"It is a confession. I have told you a lie... I told it deliberately,
for your own good."

"What did you tell me?"

"I said that the wedding day was to be on the twenty-fifth. That would
be next Wednesday."

"Yes?"

"That was the lie! I told you the wrong date. They were married on the
tenth,--twelve days ago. It is all over. The meeting is over, the
ceremony is over, the honeymoon is nearly over too. They will soon be
thinking of going home."

Cassandra looked at her, and the blood rushed over her face. A tremor
passed over it, of shock, of anguish, of incredulous surp