. Bohun, who pretends to be
crushed beneath her glance.

"To prevent you offering me any more suitors," says Mary Browne,
steadily, but with a rising blush, "I may as well tell you that I am
engaged to be married."

"Good gracious, my dear! then why didn't you say so before?" says Madam,
sitting bolt upright and letting her _pince-nez_ fall unheeded into her
lap.

"I really don't know; but I daresay because you took it for granted I
wasn't."

"Mary," says Mrs. Herrick, speaking for the first time, and for the
first time, too, calling Miss Browne by her Christian name, "tell us all
about it."

"Yes, _do_," says Monica, and all the women draw their chairs
instinctively a degree closer to the heroine of the hour, and betray in
her a warm interest. After all, what can equal a really good
love-affair?

"Go on, my dear," says Madam O'Connor, who is always full of life where
romance is concerned. "I hope it is a good marriage."

"The best in the world, for me," says Mary Browne, simply, "though he
hasn't a penny in the world but what he earns."

As she makes this awful confession, she isn't in the least confused, but
smiles brightly.

"Well, Mary, I must say I wouldn't have believed it of you," says Madam.

"I would," says Monica, hastily laying her hand on one of Mary's. "It is
just like her. After all, what has money got to do with it? Is he
_nice_, Mary?"

"So nice!" says Mary, who seems quite glad to talk about him, "and as
ugly as myself," with a little enjoyable laugh, "so we can't call each
other bad names; and his name is Peter, which of course will be
considered another drawback, though I like the name myself. And we are
very fond of each other--I have no doubt about that: and that is all, I
think."

"No, it is not all," says Madam O'Connor, severely. "May I ask when you
met this young man?"

"I must take the sting out of your tone at once, Gertrude," says her
cousin, pleasantly, "by telling you that we were engaged long _before_
poor Richard died." (Richard was the scampish brother by whose death she
inherited all.)

"Then why didn't you marry him?" says Madam.

"I was going to,--in fact, we were going to run away," says Miss Browne,
with intense enjoyment at the now remote thought,--"doesn't it sound
absurd?--when--when the news about Dick reached us, and then I could not
bring myself to leave my father, no matter how unpleasant my home be."

"What is he?" asks Olga, with a friendly desire to