he had watched him descend from his carriage, wearing a pink
carnation in his coat. She had known at once that his verdict on her
mother's state would be favourable; and it was. A burglar had tried to
get in at Daphne's sitting-room window--at least Daphne, on what
appeared to me insufficient evidence, declared that he had done so. The
window-box had fallen to the ground, and had put the burglar to
flight--that is, if there had been one. At any rate it was clearly
proved that the window-box had fallen. It contained, of course, pink
carnations.

And so on to many other instances, chief among which was the fact that
the first time she had beheld the handsome face of the Jack she was to
marry to-morrow she had worn a bunch of her favourite flowers in the
bodice of her white silk dress. Afterwards, on the day of the County
Ball, at which function he had proposed, he had sent her a bouquet
composed entirely of pink carnations, and had chosen one of those
blooms for his own buttonhole.

"Without knowing--without my having even mentioned to him that they
brought me luck!" Daphne assured me, the dark, poetic eyes in her small
face large with the mystery of it. "Do you wonder Jack agrees with me I
_must_ not be without them on my wedding-day?"

By her mother's command, and in order that she might not look, as I am
assured many brides do look, a "perfect rag" on her wedding-day, Daphne
was to rest for a certain number of hours, that afternoon. She was
forbidden, even, to write one of the seventy still remaining out of the
three hundred letters of thanks to the donors of wedding-presents.

She should have to work them off--so many a day--on her honeymoon,
Daphne ruefully supposed. Jack would help. She would make him direct
the envelopes. She bore a grudge apparently against the givers of the
treasures under which the tables in the morning-room were groaning.

"If you could only know what it has been!" she sighed. "However hard I
wrote I couldn't keep pace. No sooner had I wiped one name off the list
than three more presents had come!"

From this onerous duty, however, she was now to desist, and from all
fatigue of receiving the guests who were arriving by different trains
throughout the day. She was to lie at her ease on silken cushions in
that pretty room of her own, upon whose window-box the supposititious
burglar had set his too heavy boot. I was amused to see that the white
chintzes of the chairs and hangings were flower