‘John,’ Laura began softly at last, almost afraid to break this gloomy silence, ‘there is one thing you have not told me, and yet it is what most girls in my position would call a very important matter.’ ‘What is that, dearest?’ ‘You have never told me where we are to spend our honeymoon. Celia has been worrying me with questions about our plans, and I have found it difficult to evade her. I did not like to confess my ignorance.’ A simple and a natural question surely, yet John Treverton started, as at the sharpest thrust that Fate could have at him. ‘My dearest love--I--I have really not thought about it,’ he answered, stumblingly. ‘We will go anywhere you like. We will decide to-morrow, after the wedding.’ ‘Is not that a rather unusual mode of proceeding?’ asked Laura, with a faint laugh. She was somewhat wounded by this show of indifference as to the very first stage in their journey through life. She would have liked her lover to be full of wild schemes, to be eager to take her everywhere--to the Engadine, the Black Forest, the English Lakes, Killarney, the Trossachs--all in a breath. ‘Are not all the circumstances of our marriage unusual?’ he replied gravely. ‘There is only one thing certain, there is only one thing sweet and sacred in the whole business--we love each other truly and dearly. That is certain, is it not, Laura?’ ‘On my side quite certain.’ ‘And on my side quite as certain as that I live and that I shall die. Our love is deep and fixed, rooted in the very ground of our lives, is it not, Laura? Nothing, no stroke of time or fate can change it.’ ‘No stroke of time or fate can change my love for you,’ she said, solemnly. ‘That is all I want to know. That is the certainty which makes my soul glad and hopeful.’ ‘Why should it be otherwise? Were there ever two people more fortunate than you and I. My dear adopted father dies, leaving a will that might have made us both wretched, that might have tempted you to pretend a love you could not feel, me to give myself to a man I could not love. But instead of any such misery as that, we fall in love with each other, almost at first sight, and feel that Providence meant us for each other, and that we could be happy together in the deepest poverty?’ ‘Yes,’ said John, meditatively, ‘it is odd that my cousin Jasper should have been so sure we should suit each other.’ ‘There is a Providence in these things,’ murmured Laura. ‘If I could but think so,’ said her lover, rather to himself than to her. CHAPTER XII. AN ILL-OMENED WEDDING. The last day of the year, nature’s dullest, dreariest interval between the richness of autumn and the fresh young beauty of spring. Not a flower in the prim old Manor-house garden, save a melancholy tea-rose, that looked white and wan under the dull grey sky, and a few pallid chrysanthemums, with ragged petals and generally deplorable aspect.