"I will try if you like," say I, cheerfully, but a little shyly, as, like the March Hare and the Hatter in the "Mad Sea Party," I move up past the empty chairs to the one next him. "I do not see, after all, why I should not get quite used to it in time! Roger! Roger! it is a name I have always been very partial to until" (laughing a little) "the Claimant threw discredit on all Rogers!" He is looking at me again. After all, I must have been mistaken. There is no shadow of disappointment or mortification near him. He is smiling with some friendliness. "You must never mind what _I_ say," I continue, dragging my wicker chair along the shortly-shorn sward a little nearer to him. "_Never!_ nobody ever does; I am a proverb and a by-word for my malapropos speeches. Mother always _trembles_ when she hears me talking to a stranger. The first day that I dined after you came, Algy made me a list of things that I was not to talk about to you." "A list of sore subjects?" says my lover, laughing. "But how did the boy know what _were_ my sore subjects? What were they, Nancy?" "Oh, I do not know! I have forgotten," reply I, in some confusion. "I've made some very bad shots." And so we slip away from the subject; but, all the same, I wish that I had not said it. We have come to the day before the wedding. My spirits, which held up bravely during the first two weeks of my engagement, have now fallen--fallen, like a wind at sundown. I am as limp, lachrymose, and lamentable, a young woman as you would find between the three seas. I have cried with loud publicity in full school-room conclave; I have cried with silent privacy in bed. I have cried over the jackdaw. I have cried over the bear. I have not cried over Vick, as I am to take her with me. To-day we have _all_ cried--boys and all; and have moistened the bun-loaf and the gooseberry-jam at tea with our tears. Our spirits being now temporarily revived, I am undergoing the operation of trying my wedding-dress. I am having a private rehearsal, in fact, in mother's boudoir, with only mother, Barbara, and the maid, for audience. "Mine is the most hopeless kind of ugliness," say I, with an admirable dispassionateness, as if I were talking of some one else, as, armed in full panoply, I stand staring at my white reflection in a long mirror let into the wall--staring at myself from top to toe--from the highest jasmine star of my wreath to the lowest edge of my Brussels flounce. "If I were very fat, I might fine down; if I were very thin, I might plump up; if I were very red, I might grow pale; if I were--hush! here are the boys. I would not for worlds that they should see me!" So saying, I run behind the folding-screen--the screen which, through so many winter evenings, we have adorned with gay and ingenious pictures, and which, after having worked openly at it under her nose for a year and a half, we presented to mother _as a surprise_, on her last birthday.