"Remember the long, long life, dear," she said earnestly,--"the long years that are to come after the wedding-day. Women never could talk so lightly of marriage if they had any thought of the future. Think, Florence dear, it is a union that can only be broken by death--or shame and misery ten times worse than death. I can only repeat the stalest truisms; these things have been said a hundred times before to-day far better than I can say them; and yet day after day, year after year, there are wedding-favours worn, and wedding-bells rung, in honour of marriages that are only the beginning of life-long misery." "Cecil," cried Flo impatiently, "if you talk like that I shall begin to think you repent having married Mr. O'Boyneville." "No, no, dear, I don't repent; but I know now that I did not think seriously enough of the step I was taking." Miss Crawford had been beating the point of her pretty little boot upon the floor, and twisting the fringe of her elegant parasol into all manner of knots and entanglements during Cecil's lecture. The piquant eyebrows were contracted into a frown, and the pretty grey eyes were filled with tears, and it was not easy to discover whether anger or sorrow were the stronger in the breast of Florence Crawford. "I don't think I should have accepted Thomas," she said presently--and she had not yet brought herself to pronounce her lover's Christian name without making a wry face--"in fact, I'm sure I shouldn't have accepted him if I had known what being engaged would bring upon me. Every creature upon earth seems to make it his or her business to lecture me. People talk about hasty marriages and life-long misery just as if they had some occult power of knowing that Mr. Lobyer was predoomed to half murder me with a poker, like the men one reads of at the police-courts, within a week of our marriage. And yet what did I see before I was engaged? Every girl I knew eager to please the man I am going to marry, and every mother trying to beguile him into marrying her daughter. But now every thing is changed. People shake their heads when they talk of Mr. Lobyer, and my particular friends sigh and groan about my prospects as dismally as if I had set my heart upon marrying a chimney-sweep. If I was going to be sacrificed upon an altar to-morrow, like that young woman in Racine's tragedy, people couldn't go on about me worse than they do. Of course I don't pretend to say that I am romantically attached to Mr. Lobyer--first and foremost because I don't believe there are any romantic attachments in these days; and secondly, because if there are, I'm not at all the sort of person to be the subject of one." And then, after a little pause, Miss Crawford would continue the discussion.