of hair which had been made in London. Mistress Brown, who saw this ring for the first time, eyed it angrily, and she was not slow in giving expression to her wrath. CHAPTER III. THE BATH RING. "This ring I saw never before, Margaret," so Mistress Brown exclaimed irately. "When Mr. Smijth comes to give you his next lesson, which I will have to be his last one, you will, I desire, give it back to him, or—” Here Dandizette's grandmother clapped her hands, as is done to give applause; but she did not mean by this action to signify the giving of applause, as Dandizette knew well. "Shall I be beaten to marry not whom I love, grandmamma?" So, in phrasing not of the clearest, Dandizette asked, still playing with her Bath ring. "Is it Mr. Smijth whom you love, Margaret?" came the counter-query. "Ay. "Tis he." Dandizette, as she said this, fell back a step. Then she added bravely: "There is no gentleman in the world like Mr. Smijth for me." "My dear, you are exceedingly in love. When you shall have lived longer you will know of men's identicalness. Where difference is, you will learn, is only in their 'scutcheons." "Fie, grandmamma!" exclaimed the Lady Margaret, whose father's 'scutcheon might have inclined her to pride, howbelt it did not. "Fie, grandmamma!" was echoed in a high note of anger. "What mockado is this? Shall I be impertinenced by you! 'Oh, oh?'-nay, your 'Oh, oh's!' shall not serve your turn. Take now a turn or two of reflection." With this counsel Mistress Brown left her granddaughter,—with red A "Your wry faces and compursions of the mouth move not me, Margaret. young lady of fortune, whose papa was an earl, to marry a professed singer,-I think you are run mad! A gentleman with a pen in his ear shall please me better than that." By a gentleman with a pen in his ear Mistress Brown meant a merchant. Dandizette, a moment afterwards, found herself alone with her Bath ring. She kissed it with tears in her eyes, and, as she did so, said tenderly: "Only the rain, madam, only the rain. Our garden was grown bare and brown. This rain will recover the green." it. The rain consisted of a few heavy drops that would leave "the green" very much in the condition to which prolonged sunshine had reduced Mistress Brown might have pointed this out, but she did not do so. "Tut, Margaret," she said, "you were never thinking of the rain." "I was not, madam," Dandizette said candidly, "but what will you have me say? I am got, I know not how, into your disfavor, and whatso I do, you are unpleasable." "Your looking so sad mispleases me." The old lady, as she said this, looked at Dandizette with a face as troubled as vexed. "A young maid that is not pretty, who yet will throw her face in an expression of love and gladness shall seem pretty, but even a pretty maid shall not seem pretty when she seems moodish. Of what now thought you, Margaret?" "I thought, madam, of my marriage, -if, madam, I shall marry." This somewhat vaguely-worded speech did not elicit an answer at once, but in time it elicited one. "I desire that you shall marry, Margaret," Mistress Brown said gravely. "To sit all day with no husband opposite is a life not to be borne, but there are men not of the canaglia to marry a young lady of fortune whose father was an earl. Have a care that you do not perceive too late that you are in a wrong box, Margaret. A maid that weds has taken her career, and is run to a place where she cannot recoil herself. Now at last, my dear, you smile. Why smile you?" "Heart, madam," came the reply, marked by more candor than caution. "My thought was that the place where Mr. Smijth is, is one I shall never run away from." "Louder, Margaret! You speak low I hear not." But Margaret-even candid, incautious Margaret-did not repeat her speech. She fell into a silence, combined with the contemplation of herself in a mirror so hung that she had to stand on tiptoe. The contemplation of herself was so agreeable to Margaret as to make compensation to her for the pain of standing on tiptoe in shoes that were a size smaller than her little feet. CHAPTER V. THE SITUATION DEVELOPS. Mistress Brown was being dressed, and her granddaughter had come to wish her a good morning. By old custom this ceremony always took place while Mistress Brown was being dressed. There were a number of reasons for this. One of them was that Mistress Brown took toilet-counsel with her granddaughter, whose pleasure was not only to array herself in what she conceived to be a style "ravishing beher Own yond expression," to use quaint phrasing, but to see other persons so arrayed. This is so far from being general that it is set down here as tantamount to a good mark given to Dandizette. When Mistress Brown would say to Dandizette, "Am I too mody, think you?" Dandizette would answer, with eyes alight, "Indeed, grandmamma, no! Why should not you be mody?" and when Mistress Brown would say, "This gives me tonishness, does it not?" the reply would come as readily, "It does so, grandmamma. "Tonishness,' 'tis a sweet word!" If foolish Dandizette could have set up a standard for English, the word "tonishness," which her grandmother alone among her acquaintance used, would not have been allowed to become thus all but extinct. The old lady and the young lady had, up to the time here under consideration, been the best of friends. Not that an occasional difference did not arise between them, but it had heretofore been of the briefest duration, finding its end at the point at which Dandizette either came to see the justice of the argument set up against hers-that argument usually taking the form of a whipping, or a box on the ear-or at which she came to see the wickedness of indulging the angry passions which this treatment called into play. Being, as her grandmother allowed, the best-humored girl in the world, Dandizette never sulked for long, and there was astonishment as well as vexation in the look with which her grandmother, on the morning here in view, said, as, having raised her pale cheek to the girl's cold caress, she still held her head erect: "Miss, you are crabbish now three days." Dandizette made no reply, but such as might be considered to be conveyed in a lamentable sigh. Then she said with less irrelevance than may seem to all who read this page: "What's o'clock?" "The rapper answers," her grandmother said quietly. By "the rapper" Mistress Brown meant the door-knocker, which was at this moment played upon in a manner peculiar to Dandy. All the whiteness in Dandizette's face turned to redness, for a moment, then all the redness in it turned to whiteness, and then it was restored to its normal aspect of part red, part white. Mistress Brown, seated before a mirror to be dressed, observed these phenomena, and, being heart-fond of her granddaughter, rejoiced exceedingly at the loveliness of them. Then, she said, smiling, to her tiring-woman: "When you shall complexionify me, Susan, to make me have the colors of the Lady Margaret, I will allow you do miracles with pomatum and Spanish red." "Madam, I do my best," the tiringwoman said, meekly. "Said I you did not?" was asked testily. "You have words mightily at command." Considering the fewness and the mildness of the words used, this rebuke seemed disproportionate to the offence, but the offender, nervously operating with the two toilet-articles named by her mistress, made no protest, beyond such as was contained in a sigh. "I sit here in a whirlwind," said the sarcastic and irascible old lady. Dandizette checked a rising sigh, and substituted for it a little toe and heel movement to carry off stress of mood. Then she said, as loudly as she could, and as breezily as she dared: "Was it your earnest, grandmamma, that Mr. Smijth is to give me to-day my last lesson in singing?" "It was so, Margaret," was answered, "and 'twas my earnest that you shall give to-day to Mr. Smijth the ring you have on your finger." Dandizette's face wore for a moment a perplexed look. Then she said, with a willingness which surprised, and, if the whole truth shall be said, did not wholly please her grandmother, will give the ring to Mr. Smijth." "I Some moments later the two ladies entered the room in which Mr. Smijth was waiting for them. CHAPTER VI. A DRAMATIC MOMENT. Mr. Smijth was as dandified as ever in his dress, but his face was very pale, and there was a strained, proud look in his eyes which neither Mistress Brown nor Dandizette had ever seen there. He bowed gravely, and no light came to his face when Dandizette ap proached him, and, taking the ring from her hand, said, using the tone that reaches those with hearing, but that does not reach those who are deaf, "Sir, this ring is of the hair of my dear papa, and my grandmamma bids me give it to you." The words sounded so like mockery to love-lorn, proud Dandy that his face contracted sharply. He felt like a man in a dream, and made no answer. As discomfited as Dandy, Dandizette produced from a bag which she carried for a pocket, a handkerchief so small that twenty tears would certainly have drenched it, and said, as she put it to her eyes: "You are, Mr. Smijth, sir, a cowhearted man!" By a cow-hearted man, Dandizette meant a coward. Dandizette had acted on what she conceived to be lines permissible to a young lady of fortune whose papa was an earl, and who loved and was loved by a gentleman who was nothing more than a professed singer with the patronymic of Smijth. But Dandizette was a young maid, and Dandy was a young man, and it behooved him, so Dandizette told herself, weeping, not to act the part of a man of wood. Dandizette was still weeping when Dandy, in a transport of love and joy, took her to his heart, and held her there though Mistress Brown said, using language of eighteenth century classics already voted out of fashion in 1820: "I wonder, sir, you have this brass!" At the back of her heart, Mistress Brown had already forgiven Dandy. A man of wood was as little to her taste as to the taste of Dandizette. CHAPTER VII. AFTER A YEAR AND A DAY. Exactly a year and a day had passed since Dandy had won Dandizette. They had been man and wife for eleven months, and the sun of their happiness had shone very brightly, albeit out of clouds. It has been said that there were people who shook their heads over the roses that blossomed in Dandizette's cheeks, people who said that Dandizette would die young. It was the fading of these roses that put the clouds about the sun of Dandy's happiness. Dandizette never complained, and the first inkling that Dandy got of her ailing was her saying, day after day, at dinner, to his, "Love, shall I help you to a pigeon?" "No, Love, I thank you." Dandy and Dandizette had baptismal names, but each called the other "Love." Dandizette came to have relish for no meats, and then came to have relish for no sweets. At last a time came when Dandizette could not even eat a custard-pudding which Dandy told her he had himself "tossed up" for her. Dandy told the doctor of that, with the bright tears in his eyes. He was conscious of their being there, and said: "Sir, grief ungentlemans me." "It was typical of Dandy to say "ungentleman" for "unman." The doctor strode to his window. He had known many married couples, but never a married couple so happy as Dandy and Dandizette, and he would have foregone the fees of a year and a day to dower Dandy's wife with health. But it was not to be done. Speaking gruffly, because of his anger with himself that he found it difficult to speak, he put a string of conventional questions, the answers to which he had received times and again, and wound up by asking in an unnecessarily severe tone, if Dandy obeyed to the letter all his injunctions. As Dandy only lived for Dandizette it was impossible that any injunction bearing upon her health should be ignored by him. His pained look said this plainly, and Dandy added: "Whatso I do, she mends not in the least. She had her color when I left her, the hectic of a moment, which passed her cheek, to see me dressed to go abroad, for all her talk had been, 'You tarry too much with your Marget;' but when I saw her through the keyhole"-Dandy confessed without a blush to peering thus at his wife-"her cheek was white, and her look all hip and melancholy." "I warrant you went back to her," the doctor said, again looking out of his window. Dandy bore up, and went on speaking to the doctor. "Being returned to my wife," he said, "I sate down by her on her bed, and could find nothing to say. I think, sir, we were thus together an hour, when she said: "There is a ravishing sweetness in silence which I knew never before!' When a young lady, sir, finds a ravishing sweetness in silence, is not death near?" Dandy said this so gravely that the doctor checked the smile which almost started to his face. Then he averred, either in pity of Dandy, or in mercy to young ladies, that death is not neces sarily near because a young lady finds. a ravishing sweetness in silence. Dandy eased his mind by talking on. "She spoke a great deal after that," he said, "all, sir, in towering tragics. 'Now we see,' says she, 'that flounces,. feathers, fallals and finery is show and superficials all.' When a young lady speaks thus, shall one not fear, sir? I am put into the utmost consternation." Again the doctor only placed his hand on Dandy's shoulder. "You speak not, sir!" Dandy exclaimed, and for the first time his manner showed something that was not only grief. "Now I shall put to you a question," he added, "which your not answering shall make me the angriest man that you saw ever. My sweet wife, sir, is like one at point to die. Is: it any of my fault, sir?" The doctor faced round unhesitatingly. "No, sir," he said, "'tis none of your fault. When the Lady Margaret was a little child, I was called to attend her in a sickness, and said then, "There is not here what will last twenty years.' What age is her ladyship of?" "Her age is eighteen years," Dandy said brokenly. A heavy silence fell here. "Would you, sir," the voice was the doctor's, "that I should return with you to her ladyship?" Dandy signified an affirmative, and an hour later preceded the doctor into his wife's room. A bullfinch was hung in the window of this room, and piped 'Britons, rouse up your great magnanimity!' The doctor, with a face of protest, explained himself as of opinion that this martial music was out of place in a sick room. Dandy smiled, and pointed to his wife. "She is fallen soundly asleep," he whispered; "only her baby wakes." Dandizette's baby lay open-eyed in her arms. The doctor bent and took the baby, |