something sweet in being awakened late; it prolongs the morning, it keeps the “vision splendid” a little longer in one’s eyes. The unfulfilled even has a glory of its own, which people who are bigoted in belief of the ordinary canons of romance are slow to perceive. This preserved to Lady Jane, at an age when girlhood is over, its most perfect fragrance and charm. Presently, however, the sweet vagueness of her anticipations began to open into other thoughts. She had been so preserved by her stately upbringing and the traditions which she had felt to centre in her, from knowledge of fact and the world, that she knew little at all about money, or the power it has to bridge over social differences. When she allowed her heart to go out to Reginald Winton, she did so with the most absolute conviction that it involved a great descent in rank and abandonment of luxury. She would have to put off the coronet from her head, she believed, the princess royal’s myrtle crown. She would have to learn a great many things, both to do and to do without. She had heard of Winton House, which was a small place; and probably she had heard of the house in town. But the latter had altogether dropped out of her mind, and she knew very well that a squire’s little manor would be very different from Billings, and would require from its mistress an existence of a kind unknown to all her previous experiences. She would have to superintend her own household; if not to make her maids spin, according to the usage of old times, at least to direct the housemaids, and know how things ought to be done. Though her father was in reality much less rich than the man whom she had chosen for her husband, she was entirely in the dark on this point, and her mind awoke to a sense of a hundred requirements of which she knew nothing. She had been like a star, and dwelt apart (if it is not profane to apply such words to a young lady of the nineteenth century) as much as any poet. But now love and duty bade her come down from these heights, and learn how people walk along the common ways. She addressed herself to this task without a grudge, with glad alacrity and readiness; but she was a little puzzled, it must be admitted, to know how to begin. The first person to whom she addressed herself (for naturally Lady Jane was shy of betraying her motive, or letting it be known that the inquiries she made were for her own benefit) was her maid, who was as superior a young person and as much like a waiting gentlewoman as it was possible to find. Lady Jane was aware, of course, that Arabella’s family (for this was the distinguished name she bore) were not in the same position as Mr Winton. But in that sad deficiency of perspective which we have already noted as one of the drawbacks of rank, she felt it possible that Arabella’s knowledge of how life was conducted at her end of the social circle would be more useful than her own to Reginald Winton’s wife. She opened