have you been doing all these hours?"

"I don't know--thinking,"

"And you never came to wish me good-night."

"I did not think you would want me. I thought you would be busy
packing--for your honeymoon."

"That was not kind, Violet. You must have known that I should have many
painful thoughts to-night."

"I did not know it. And if it is so I can only say it is a pity the
painful thoughts did not come a little sooner."

"Violet, you are as hard as iron, as cold as ice!" cried Mrs. Tempest,
with passionate fretfulness.

"No, I am not, mamma; I can love very warmly, where I love deeply. I
have given this night to thoughts of my dead father, whose place is to
be usurped in this house from to-morrow."

"I never knew anyone so obstinately unkind. I could not have believe it
possible in my own daughter. I thought you had a good heart, Violet;
and yet you do not mind making me intensely wretched on my wedding-day."

"Why should you be wretched, mamma, because I prefer not to be present
at your wedding? If I were there, I should be like the bad fairy at the
princess's christening. I should look at everything with a malevolent
eye."

Mrs. Tempest flung herself into a chair and burst into tears.

The storm of grief which had been brooding over her troubled mind all
day, broke suddenly in a tempest of weeping. She could have given no
reason for her distress; but all at once, on the eve of that day which
was to give a new colour to her life, panic seized her, and she
trembled at the step she was about to take.

"You are very cruel to me, Violet," she sobbed. "I am a most miserable
woman."

Violet knelt beside her and gently took her hand, moved to pity by
wretchedness so abject.

"Dear mamma, why miserable?" she asked. "This thing which you are doing
is your own choice. Or, if it is not--if you have yielded weakly to
over-persuasion--it is not too late to draw back. No, dear mother, even
now it is not too late. Indeed, it is not. Let us run away as soon as
it is light, you and I, and go off to Spain, or Italy, anywhere,
leaving a letter for Captain Winstanley, to say you have changed your
mind. He could not do anything to us. You have a right to draw back,
even at the last."

"Don't talk nonsense, Violet," cried Mrs. Tempest peevishly. "Who said
I had changed my mind? I am as devoted to Conrad as he is to me. I
should be a heartless wretch if I could throw him over at the last
moment. But this has been a most ag