He paid the promised visit to Mrs. Cumberland in the morning. Ellen was on the beach with the maid; there was no interruption, and their conversation was long and confidential. Heaven alone knew how Arthur Bohun succeeded in making Mrs. Cumberland believe in the necessity for a private marriage. He did succeed. But he used no subterfuge. He frankly told of the prejudice his mother had taken against Ellen Adair, and that she had gained the ear of Sir Nash. In short, the same arguments he had used to himself the previous evening, he urged now. Mrs. Cumberland--naturally biassed against madam for the injury she had striven to work upon Dr. Rane--thought it a frightful shame that she should also strive to destroy the happiness and prospects of her own son Arthur, and sympathized with him warmly. It was this feeling that rendered her more easy than she would otherwise have been--in short, that made her give her consent to Arthur's plan. To counteract the bitter wrong contemplated by Mrs. North, she considered would be a merit on Arthur's part, instead of a sin. And then, when things were so far settled, and the speedy marriage determined on, Mrs. Cumberland astonished Captain Bohun by putting Mr. Adair's letter into his hands, explaining how it came to be received, and what she had written to that gentleman to call it forth. "So that her father's blessing will rest on the marriage," remarked Mrs. Cumberland; "but for that fact, I could not have consented to a private one." This gave Arthur the opportunity to ask about the position of Mr. Adair, which, in the heat of argument, he had been forgetting. Certainly he was a gentleman, Mrs. Cumberland answered, and of very good Scotch family. Major Bohun, Mr. Adair, and her own husband, George Cumberland, had been firm friends in India at the time of Major Bohun's death. She could not help thinking, she added in conclusion, that it was the remembrance of that early friendship which induced Mr. Adair to give so ready and cordial a consent to his daughter's union with Major Bohun's son. And so there the matter ended, all couleur-de-rose; Arthur believing that there could be no possible objection to his marrying Ellen Adair; nay, that the way had been most markedly paved for it through this letter of Mr. Adair's; Mrs. Cumberland deeming that she was not indiscreet in permitting the marriage to be a private one. Both were unsuspicious as the day. He, that there existed any real objection; she, that Mr. Adair's consent applied to a very different man from Arthur Bohun. Captain Bohun went out from Mrs. Cumberland's in search of Ellen, with the light of love flushing his cheeks. He found her in the same sheltered spot, hedged in from the gaze of the world. Again alone. The servant had gone to the shops, to buy ribbon. Their salutations hitherto had been nothing but decorum and formality, as witness that of the previous day. "Good-morning," said Ellen, rising and holding out her hand.