e to put on my traveling-dress! The
odious parting moment has come. The carriage is at the door: the maid
and valet are in the dickey. What a pity that they are not bride and
bridegroom too! Vick has jumped in--alert and self-respecting again now
that she has bitten off her favor.

I have begun my voluminous farewells. I have kissed them all round once,
and am beginning again. How can one make up one's mind where to stop?
with whom to end?

"Never you marry, Barbara!" say I, in a sobbing whisper, as I clasp her
in my last embrace, greatly distorting my new bonnot, "it is _so_
disagreeable!"

We are off, followed by a tornado of shoes--one, aimed with dexterous
violence by that unlucky Bobby, goes nigh to cut the bridegroom's left
eye open, as he waves his good-byes.

As we trot smartly away, I turn round in the carriage and look at them
through my tears. There they all are! After all, what a nice-looking
family! Even Tou Tou! there is something pretty about her, and standing
as she is now, her legs look quite nice and thick.

* * * * *

We reach Dover before dinner-time. Sir Roger has gone out to speak to
the courier who meets us there. I am left alone in our great stiff
sitting-room at the Lord Warden. Instantly I rush to the
writing-materials.

"What, writing already?" says my husband, reentering, and coming over
with a smile toward me. "Have you forgotten any of your finery?"

"No, no!" cry I, impulsively, spreading both hands over the sheet; "do
not look! you must not look!"

"Do you think I _should_?" he says, reproachfully, turning quickly away.

"But you may," cry I, with one of my sudden useless remorses, holding
out the note to him. "Do! I should like you to!--I do not know why I
said it!--I was only sending them a line, just to tell them how
_dreadfully_ I missed them all!"

CHAPTER X.

I have been married a week. A _week_ indeed! a week in the sense in
which the creation of the world occupied a week!--seven geological ages,
perhaps, but _not_ seven days. We have been to Brussels, to Antwerp, to
Cologne. We have seen--(with the penetrating incense odor in our
nostrils, and the kneeling peasants at our feet)--the Descent from the
Cross, the Elevation of the Cross--dead Christs manifold. Can it be
possible that the brush which worthily painted Christ's agony, can be
the same that descended to eternize redundant red fishwives, and call
them goddesses? We have