"Would you really?" she asks, in the almost awed tones of one who, from being quite destitute, has had the Koh-i-Noor put into his hand, and whose fingers are afraid to close over the mighty jewel; "would you really? then I am sorry I asked them; but"--with intense wistfulness--"if you only knew how I long to give you a little pleasure, a little enjoyment--you who have given me so infinitely much." If Miss Wilson were ever addicted to the figure of speech called irony, she might be supposed to be employing it now; but one glance at her simple face would show that it expressed nothing but adoring gratitude. Her one good fortnight has spread its radiant veil backwards over her eight barren years. He takes her hand, and passes the fingers across his lips, murmuring indistinctly and guiltily behind them: "Do I really make you happy?" "Do you?"--echoes she, while the transfiguring tears well into her glorified pale eyes--"I should not have thought it possible that so much joy could have been packed into any fortnight as I have had crammed into mine!" They have to set off to Vallombrosa at seven o'clock in the morning, an hour at which few of us are at our cleverest, handsomest, or our best tempered; nor is the party of six, either in its proportion of women to men--four to two--or in its component parts, a very well adjusted one. They are too numerous to be contained in one carriage, and are therefore divided into two separate bands--three and three. Whether by some manoeuvre of the well-meaning Amelia, or by some scarcely fortunate accident, Burgoyne finds himself seated opposite to his betrothed and to Elizabeth; while Byng follows in the second vehicle as _vis-à-vis_ to Cecilia and Mrs. Le Marchant. There is a general feeling of wrongness about the whole arrangement--a sense of mental discomfort equivalent to that physical one of having put on your clothes inside out, or buttoned your buttons into unanswering buttonholes.