y that made one anxious, it was the Future!" (Lady Maria knew
that the word began in this case with a capital letter.) "No one knows
what the Future is to poor women. One knows that one must get older, and
one may not keep well, and if one could not be active and in good
spirits, if one could not run about on errands, and things fell off,
_what_ could one do? It takes hard work, Lady Maria, to keep up even the
tiniest nice little room and the plainest presentable wardrobe, if one
isn't clever. If I had been clever it would have been quite different, I
dare say. I have been so frightened sometimes in the middle of the
night, when I wakened and thought about living to be sixty-five, that I
have lain and shaken all over. You see," her blush had so far
disappeared that she looked for the moment pale at the memory, "I had
nobody--nobody."

"And now you are going to be the Marchioness of Walderhurst," remarked
Lady Maria.

Emily's hands, which rested on her knee, wrung themselves together.

"That is what it seems impossible to believe," she said, "or to be
grateful enough for to--to--" and she blushed all over again.

"Say 'James'," put in Lady Maria, with a sinful if amiable sense of
comedy; "you will have to get accustomed to thinking of him as 'James'
sometimes, at all events."

But Emily did not say "James." There was something interesting in the
innocent fineness of her feeling for Lord Walderhurst. In the midst of
her bewildered awe and pleasure at the material splendours looming up in
her horizon, her soul was filled with a tenderness as exquisite as the
religion of a child. It was a combination of intense gratitude and the
guileless passion of a hitherto wholly unawakened woman--a woman who had
not hoped for love or allowed her thoughts to dwell upon it, and who
therefore had no clear understanding of its full meaning. She could not
have explained her feeling if she had tried, and she did not dream of
trying. If a person less inarticulate than herself had translated it to
her she would have been amazed and abashed. So would Lord Walderhurst
have been amazed, so would Lady Maria; but her ladyship's amazement
would have expressed itself after its first opening of the eyes, with a
faint elderly chuckle.

When Miss Fox-Seton had returned to town she had returned with Lady
Maria to South Audley Street. The Mortimer Street episode was closed, as
was the Cupps' house. Mrs. Cupp and Jane had gone to Chichester, Jane
le