“It is all a muddle,” she said, “there is no satisfaction at all in it; she thought he flirted with Miss Reredos, and he thought she flirted with some of the officers; and Miss Reredos has such a grudge at him for falling in love with anybody but herself, that she did all she could to help them to a quarrel; and a very good thing, too, for of course they never would have been so mad as to marry, and I dislike long engagements exceedingly; only since then it is really almost impossible to endure Maurice in the house. He is _so_ ill-tempered, it is really quite dreadful. I am sure, when I was young, I never gave my parents any uneasiness about me, yet my two eldest children seem to think it quite an amusement to worry me out of my life.” “Let us believe they don’t do it on purpose,” said I; “troubles never come single, you know--and I daresay this is the most critical time of their life.” “Ah, Alice should have had all these affairs over long ago!” said Mrs. Harley, disapprovingly; “Alice is seven and twenty, Mrs. Crofton--she ought to have been settled in life years ago. I am sure, considering all the opportunities she has had, it is quite disgraceful. I can’t help feeling that people--her father’s friends, for instance--will blame me.” I found it difficult not to smile at this refinement of maternal anxiety, but after a while succeeded in soothing the good mother, whose mind was evidently eased by the utterance, and persuading her that everything would come right. She went away shaking her head, but smiling through her anxious looks. She laid down her burden at my door, and left it there. When she had gone I took up my portion of it with sundry compunctions. Bertie Nugent had been seven years away--when he went away Alice was scarcely twenty. They had of course been very much in each other’s society before this, but seven years is a long break, even for lovers. These two were not lovers; and was not Clara right when she stigmatized as the merest foolish romance any interest which Alice might have in her long-departed and indifferent playfellow? I began to blame myself for cherishing in my own mind the lingering hope that my wishes might still be accomplished concerning them. Perhaps that hope had, by some subtle means, betrayed itself to Alice, and had helped to strengthen her in her natural perversity and the romance of that vague visionary link which existed only in her mind and mine. I have known very similar cases more than once in my life--cases in which a childish liking, kept up only by chance inquiries or friendly messages at long intervals on one side or the other, has forestalled the imagination of the two subjects of it so completely, that both have kept from all engagements for years, until at long and last, encountering each other once again, they have discovered themselves to have loved each other all this time, and married out of hand. This vague sort of tie, which is no