The brilliant Florence did not inform her father that she had been crying all through the previous night, and that copious applications of cold water and _eau-de-Cologne_ had alone prevented her appearing at the fashionable altar with swollen red circles surrounding her pretty grey eyes. The express-train that bore Mr. Lobyer and his bride to Dover on the first stage of their continental tour rushed past many a pleasant rustic dwelling, nestling deep amid summer verdure: and, looking down at humble homesteads and cottage-gardens, warmly tinted by the westering sun, the millionaire's wife thought sadly: "I wonder whether the people who live in cottages marry for love?" CHAPTER XIX. TIDINGS FROM INDIA. For Lady Cecil the summer months in Bloomsbury were very dreary. And it may be here confessed that Bloomsbury is rather dreary in the summer evenings, when the rifleman's "little drum has beat to bed" in the quadrangle before the Foundling Hospital, and vagrant children hawk pitiful bunches of flowers in the squares and streets. But are not the endless terraces and oblong squares of Tyburnia, and even the broad highways of Belgravia, apt to seem not a little dismal in the fading light, when the sickly gas-lamps struggle faintly with the last glimmer of day, and shabby wanderers prowl the pavements and look enviously at the rolling chariots of wealth? Cecil O'Boyneville abandoned herself entirely to the unbroken monotony of her life. She had yet to learn to find her own society and her own occupations, in common with the wives of other busy men. She accepted the lot that fell into her lap, and did not attempt to change or modify it. Her husband was kind to her, generous, affectionate, confiding, and she wished to do her duty. If Laurence O'Boyneville made no change in his bachelor-habits, if he devoted his nights to study and his evenings to sleep, he had perhaps some excuse for his devotion to the profession he loved, in the fact that his wife made no attempt to alter the scheme of his existence. No salaried housekeeper could have been more submissive than the Earl of Aspendell's daughter showed herself to the sovereign will of her lord: so Mr. O'Boyneville told his old friends and familiars that he was the happiest fellow in existence, and that his wife was an angel.