ong. They
don't seem to understand that I'm improving on the original. We were
discussing my future husband, and the serenade was in his honour,"
explained Peggy with an unconscious serenity, at which her two
companions exchanged glances of astonishment.

"He is quite an imaginary hero as yet," Mrs Saville explained hastily,
"but the subject having been introduced, I was explaining to Peggy that
I should be extremely difficult to satisfy, and could not consent to
spare her to a man who did not come up to my ideal in every respect."

"And Peggy herself--what does she say? Has she an ideal, too, and what
shape does it take, if one may ask?" queried Hector, with an
embarrassment of manner which the mother noticed, if the daughter did
not.

Mrs Saville shaded her eyes with her hands and gazed keenly across the
room to where the two figures stood in the window, the man so tall and
imposing, the girl so small and dainty in her pretty white dress.

"Oh, I'm not exacting," said Peggy coolly. "I'm going to marry a man
with `heaps of money and a moustache, and a fireplace in the hall,' as
Mellicent used to say when we planned out our future in the old school-
days. Dear old Mill! I wonder if she is as funny as ever, and if she
still mixes up her sentences in the same comical way. I shall be
terribly disappointed if she doesn't. Five, six more weeks before I see
her and all the other vicarage people, and already I'm in a ferment of
impatience. Every mile we travel nearer home, the more I long for the
time to come; and when we get to London I really don't know how I shall
last out the fortnight before I go down to the country."

"Would it help matters if we invited Mellicent to come and join us in
London? She would enjoy the experience of living in an hotel and house-
hunting with us. You can write and ask her, dear, if you like," said
Mrs Saville fondly; and Peggy clasped her hands together in one of the
old ecstatic gestures.

"How s-imply lovely! Mother dear, you are an admirable person. There
is nothing in the world I should like so much, and it would be so wise,
too, for Mellicent and I would have time to get through our first
floodgates of talk before I met the others, so that I should not be torn
asunder by wanting to speak to every one at the same time. It will be a
wild dissipation for the dear old girl to stay in an hotel, and she does
enjoy herself so beamingly when she is out for a holiday that it's