“O, but, Arthur, you forget the present,” said Kate Vavasour--“the present that cost, O, _such_ a quantity of money!--mamma did not say how much. But it’s a brooch like a bull’s-eye, only flat, with a white stripe across it; and it came from the jeweller’s at Leigh, with several others to choose from, and mamma kept the biggest. She said it was ‘just the thing,’ but I can’t say that I admired it much.” “I should think not,” said her brother scornfully--“a wretched Scotch pebble as a wedding present for the wife of such a tenant as John Beacham--a man whose father and grandfather were born and bred on the land! Such a favourite of my father’s too;” and Arthur Vavasour, who had just returned from a nine-months’ foreign tour, and who, in the company of a pleasant and amenable tutor, had lost for a time the memory of Lady Millicent’s “wholesome retrenchments,” made a mental resolve to contrast her niggardly _cadeau_ to Honor Blake with an offering of his own which would be more worthy of the bride’s acceptance. He and his favourite sister Kate, a lively girl, but without any great pretensions to beauty, and who, in Lady Millicent’s opinion, required a good deal of keeping under, were sauntering through the once beautifully kept conservatory, where now--infinitely to Arthur’s disgust--he could trace the same “odious system of dirty economy” which everywhere met his eye. “It isn’t nice, certainly,” Kate said, stooping while she spoke to pick off the dead leaves of a neglected pelargonium; “I am afraid they will all think it so mean. Much better to have given nothing. However, I am glad we’re going; we so seldom do anything lively, that even this seems quite a change. Besides, Atty, you will like to see the bride. She was away last year with the Clay’s Farm children for change of air, after they had scarlet-fever,” continued Kate, who was a great picker-up of local news, a peculiarity in a young lady of “position,” for which Lady Millicent’s treatment of her children was in a great degree the cause. “You missed seeing her then, I remember. But, Arthur, do tell me, is there no chance of the Castle growing livelier, do you think? What a time it is now since things have been as they used to be! and then that dismal half-mourning! It can’t be,” lowering her voice, “for my poor father all this time. Don’t you think now, Arthur, that mamma will surely make _some_ change at Gillingham soon?” “Can’t say,” said Arthur, throwing the end of the cigar he had been smoking upon the ill-cleaned mosaic pavement of the conservatory; “I never attempt either to understand my mother or to make the slightest guess as to what she is going to do. But about this wonderful beauty who is to be made a wife of to-day--who is she? And what do people know about her?”