he table, and regarding him
anxiously from the right side of the very forward urn that still will
come in her way. "What shall I wear?"

"It can't matter," says Dorian: "you look lovely in everything, so it
is impossible for you to make a mistake."

"It is a pity you can't talk sense,"--reproachfully. Then, with a
glance literally heavy with care, "There is that tea-green satin
trimmed with Chantilly."

"I forget it," says Dorian, professing the very deepest interest, "but
I know it is all things."

"No, it isn't: I can't bear the sleeves. Then"--discontentedly--"there
is that velvet."

"The very thing,"--enthusiastically.

"Oh, Dorian, dear! What are you thinking of? Do remember how warm the
weather is."

"Well, so it is,--grilling," says Mr. Branscombe, nobly confessing his
fault.

"Do you like me in that olive silk?" asks she, hopefully, gazing at
him with earnest intense eyes.

"Don't I just?" returns he, fervently, rising to enforce his words.

"Now, don't be sillier than you can help," murmurs she, with a lovely
smile. "Don't! I like that gown myself, you know: it makes me look so
nice and old, and that."

"If I were a little girl like you," says Mr. Branscombe, "I should
rather hanker after looking nice and young."

"But not too much so: it is frivolous when one is once married." This
pensively, and with all the air of one who has long studied the
subject.

"Is it? Of course you know best, your experience being greater than
mine," says Dorian, meekly, "but, just for choice, I prefer youth to
anything else."

"Do you? Then I suppose I had better wear white."

"Yes, do. One evening, in Paris, you wore a white gown of some sort,
and I dreamt of you every night for a week afterwards."

"Very well. I shall give you a chance of dreaming of me again," says
Georgie, with a carefully suppressed sigh, that is surely meant for
the beloved olive gown.

The sigh is wasted. When she does don the white gown so despised, she
is so perfect a picture that one might well be excused for wasting
seven long nights in airy visions filled all with her. Some wild
artistic marguerites are in her bosom (she plucked them herself from
out the meadow an hour agone); her lips are red, and parted; her hair,
that is loosely knotted, and hangs low down, betraying the perfect
shape of her small head, is "yellow, like ripe corn." She smiles as
she places her hand in Dorian's and asks him how she looks; while he,
being all t