Fox-Seton was not the
world. She represented a something which was so primitively of the
emotions that one's heart spoke and listened to her. Agatha was
conscious that Miss Fox-Seton had seen at Mallowe--she could never quite
understand how it had seemed so naturally to happen--a phase of her
feelings which no one else had seen before. Bruce had seen it since, but
only Bruce. There had actually been a sort of confidence between them--a
confidence which had been like intimacy, though neither of them had been
effusive.

"Mamma is so happy," the girl said. "It is quite wonderful. And Alix and
Hilda and Millicent and Eve--oh! it makes such a difference to them. I
shall be able," with a blush which expressed a world of relieved
affection, "to give them so much pleasure. Any girl who marries happily
and--and well--can alter everything for her sisters, if she _remembers_.
You see, I shall have reason to remember. I know things from experience.
And Bruce is so kind, and gay, and proud of their prettiness. Just
imagine their excitement at all being bridesmaids! Bruce says we shall
be like a garden of spring flowers. I am so glad," her eyes suddenly
quite heavenly in their joyful relief, "that he is _young_!"

The next second the heavenly relieved look died away. The exclamation
had been involuntary. It had sprung from her memory of the days when she
had dutifully accepted, as her portion, the possibility of being smiled
upon by Walderhurst, who was two years older than her father, and her
swift realisation of this fact troubled her. It was indelicate to have
referred to the mental image even ever so vaguely.

But Emily Fox-Seton was glad too that Sir Bruce was young, that they
were all young, and that happiness had come before they had had time to
tire of waiting for it. She was so happy herself that she questioned
nothing.

"Yes. It is nice," she answered, and glowed with honest sympathy. "You
will want to do the same things. It is so agreeable when people who are
married like to do the same things. Perhaps you will want to go out a
great deal and to travel, and you could not enjoy it if Sir Bruce did
not."

She was not reflecting in the least upon domestic circles whose male
heads are capable of making themselves extremely nasty under stress of
invitations it bores them to accept, and the inclination of wives and
daughters to desire acceptance. She was not contemplating with any
premonitory regrets a future in which, whe