A few hours later, the quietest wedding that had ever been known in that part of the country took place in the parish church of Chayleigh, very much to the dissatisfaction of the few spectators who had had sufficient good fortune to be correctly informed of the early hour appointed for the ceremony. "Gray silk, my dear, and a chip bonnet, as plain as you please," said Miss Laughton, the village dressmaker, to Miss Harland, the village milliner. "I should like to know what poor Mrs. Carteret, that's dead and gone, but had as genteel a taste in dress as ever I knew, would say to such a set-out as that." "I expect, Jemima," replied Miss Harland, who had a strong dash of spite in her composition, and felt herself aggrieved at the loss of Mrs. Hungerford's modest custom in the article of widow's caps--"I expect madam would not have caught Mr. Baldwin easy, if Mrs. Carteret was alive; and gray silk and chip is good enough for her. I wonder what she wore at her wedding, when she ran away with Mr. Hungerford--which he was a gay chap, whatever they had to say against him." In these days, the avoidance of festive proceedings on the occasion of a marriage is not unusual; but when Margaret was married, that the bride and bridegroom should drive away from the church-door was an almost unheard-of proceeding. Nevertheless, Mr. Baldwin and Margaret departed after that fashion; and Lady Davyntry only returned to Chayleigh to console Mr. Carteret, who really did not seem to need consolation. A few days later, as Margaret and her husband were strolling arm-in-arm in the evening along the sea-shore of a then almost unknown village in South Wales,--now a prosperous and consequently intolerable "watering-place,"--Mr. Baldwin said to her--they had been talking of some letters he had had from his steward: "I wonder if you have any doubts in your mind about liking the Deane, Margaret. I am longing to see you there, to watch you making acquaintance with the place, taking your throne in your own kingdom." "And I," she said with a smile and a wistful look in her gray eyes, "sometimes think that when I am there I shall feel like Lady Burleigh." CHAPTER III. THREE LETTERS.