the second post is due, and receive one of your welcome letters; and I know that I am not dreaming, but that I am actually married. Oh, Laurence, I sometimes look at the Harpers and say to myself--If they knew! I wish that this waiting was over! I wish my father would come! This delay makes me so nervous and so jumpy. It’s like sitting in a dentist’s drawing-room! I sincerely hope that anticipation will prove to be the worst part of the business. Miss Harper is coming. I hear her heavy step! No--I breathe again. Only fancy, she asked me yesterday, with one of her old sharp looks, _whom_ I was always writing to? and I was fortunate to have so many friends--such wonderful correspondents! With a kind of sneer, then, she said, ‘I’m going out, and I may as well post your letter,’ but I need not tell you that I declined her amiable offer, and posted it myself. You say that baby screams at night, and must be consigned to an outhouse, if he continues to make night hideous. How inhuman of you, Laurence, to write such horrid things, even in joke! Do you think he could possibly be missing _me_, or is this a foolish idea with respect to an infant of five months old? Ask Mrs. Holt to feel his gums. Perhaps it is a tooth? And now good-bye, with many kisses to him, and kind remembrances to the Holts. “I am, your loving wife, “M. W.” Very shortly after this letter was despatched Mrs. Harper received a telegram from the agents to say that the _Ophir_ was expected at Plymouth the next afternoon. What a fuss ensued, what rushing and running and packing, and calling for twine and luggage labels, and leather straps and sandwiches on the part of an excited spinster, who was enchanted at the prospect of a jaunt down to Devonshire--all expenses paid. Once fairly off, and away from her own familiar beat, she was little better than a child. It was not Miss Harper who looked after Madeline, but Madeline who took care of her. At every big station she was seized with a panic, and called out, “Porter, where are we now? How long do we stop? Do we change? Is the luggage all right?” Her fussy flight to the refreshment-rooms, and frantic dashes back to the carriage--usually the wrong one--was amusing to her fellow-travellers, but not to Madeline; and, besides this, her shrill and constant chatter about “your father,” “I do hope the _Ophir_ won’t be late,” “she is a splendid steamer, 10,000-horse power,” “and I hope they have had a good passage,” made her former pupil feel a keen desire to say something cross, knowing that Miss Harper imagined that she was impressing the other inmates of the carriage, but in reality was making herself supremely ridiculous.