Daphne’s conduct since her engagement had been unobjectionable. Nobody could deny her sweetness, or could fail to approve the sobriety which had come over her manners and conversation. Her hot fits and cold fits, her high spirits and low spirits, were all over. She was uniformly amiable and uniformly grave—not taking rapturous pleasure in anything, but seemingly contented with her lot in life, devoted in her affection to her sister, unvaryingly kind to her lover. Edgar was never tired of thanking heaven for the blessedness of his lot. He had remitted his tenants five-and-twenty per cent. of their March rents; not that there was any special need for such indulgence, but because he longed to be generous to somebody, and to disseminate his overflowing joy. ‘I shall do the same for you next October, in honour of my marriage,’ he said in his speech at the audit dinner; ‘and after that I shall want all the money you can pay me, as a family man.’ Madoline, utterly happy in her lover’s society, after that interval of severance which had seemed so long and dreary, cared very little where their lives were to be spent, so long as they were to be together. Yet the idea of revisiting Lake Leman—which she had seen and loved seven years ago in a quiet pilgrimage with her father—with Gerald for her attendant and companion, had a certain fascination. ‘It is rather like anticipating our honeymoon, is it not, dear?’ he asked laughingly. ‘But when the honeymoon comes we shall find some new world to explore.’ ‘Would you like to take me to the Red River?’ ‘I think that would be a shade too rough, even for your endurance. The Italian lakes, and a winter in Rome, would suit us better. It is all very well for a man to travel in a district where he has to cover his face with a muffler, and head the driving snow, till he is nearly suffocated with his frozen breath, and has to get himself thawed carefully at the first camp-fire; but that kind of experience lasts a long time, and it is pleasing to fall back upon the old habit of luxurious travelling, and to ride in a _coupé_ through Mont Cenis or St. Gotthard, and to arrive at one’s destination without any large risk of being swallowed whole in a swamp, or burned alive in a prairie fire.’ ‘I shall delight in seeing Rome with you,’ Madoline answered gently. ‘I thought you would like it. I really know my Rome. It is a subject I have studied thoroughly, and I shall love playing cicerone for you.’