If I smiled a little as she told her story, Heaven forgive me, for I would not willingly wound a young and ardent heart; but to have Drusilla's altruistic zeal to be a hospital nurse so suddenly laid bare was more than flesh and blood--at any rate the flesh and blood of my tell-tale lips--could stand. She took it very well, though, as we can take things when we are preoccupied or they make us happy. Mrs. Duckie came in just as I was ready for Drusilla's wedding, and looked me over approvingly. "It will be a nicer wedding than ours the other day," she said a little wistfully. "I can't forget those comic men. The idea of comicalities at a wedding! But there, one never knows what the world's coming to! I shan't get my peace of mind back till Be-trice goes off. No comicalities then, I promise you. I mean to write to Canon Lyme to ask him as a great favour to oblige. His wedding sermons are beautiful. Not a dry eye." The good woman, she is quite right. Weddings are for tears: only those guests who can cry really enjoy them. I did not myself cry at Drusilla's,--at least I produced no tears,--but it was a melancholy occasion. Such was the haste that the two families had had no time to become acquainted, and we seemed to be engaged rather in some ceremony of hostility than of fusion. We fell naturally into sides, Montagus, almost, and Capulets. To add to the difficulty, the father and mother of the bridegroom were so much like several other members of their party that slights were of constant occurrence; but this is a common experience at weddings, where the newness of clothes cancels personality. However, even weddings come to an end, and by four o'clock we were cheering a departing brougham on its way to Waterloo for Southhampton and South America. There was no singing of "Mr. Right," but I felt very little uneasiness as to Drusilla's future. None the less, the more I revolved the matter that evening the more did I wonder that affectionate parents can ever give their consent to their children's marriage at all. I can understand a father having no particular objection to his son's wife, and a mother to her daughter's husband; but how a father can ever even tolerate his daughter's husband or a mother the wife of her son, that is beyond my imagination. And that night as I watched Alderley's gallant efforts to be gay at dinner I realised my perplexity more than ever. Life can be very hard on parents. CHAPTER XXVI MR. DABNEY AGAIN SUFFERS, AND THE YOUNGER GENERATION DOES NOT KNOCK AT THE DOOR, BUT WALKS RIGHT IN AND TALKS EXTRAORDINARY STRANGE TALK Old Mrs. Wynne, who in spite of the failure of her own plans, persists in considering this match her own making, and who came all the way from Ludlow to attend the wedding, paid us a call the next morning, to my great surprise.