Once in Ellen’s crowded bedchamber she became hysterical, to her cousin’s great grief. But she overmastered her emotion by a violent effort, excused it on the plea of recent indisposition, and was consoled by her mother and other sagacious matrons with the remark that such affections might be expected. The newly-married pair were whirled away down Oldham Street and up Piccadilly; old Mrs. Clowes took her departure, and then Augusta, acting on Mrs. Clough’s advice, lay on the drawing-room sofa to rest. Not until night did the guests depart, Mr. Liverseege being the first to retire. There was a late dinner at six o’clock, and when the gentlemen rose from their post-prandial wine, and sought the drawing-room, all considerably elevated, Laurence Aspinall was too intoxicated to move. The Aspinall carriage had been waiting an hour. The coachman and Bob the groom grew anxious and impatient about the horses. “Mr. Laurence drunk? Eh! that matters nowt!” exclaimed the latter. “Steve an’ me’ll manage him.” And taking the limp young Hercules between them, they somehow hauled him to the carriage, and ensconced him in one corner, with his head drooping on his breast. Augusta shrank from joining him, afraid lest he should awake to malicious consciousness on the road. “Oh! I dare not go home with him! Indeed, I dare not go home with him!” “My dear,” said her mother gravely, “I am afraid you _must_. A wife cannot absent herself from home because her lord and master indulges in too much wine, even though he may occasionally make a beast of himself. It is too late to think of this _now_. What cannot be cured must be endured. As you made your own bed, you will have to lie on it to the end. Those who leave the spring for the stream must expect muddy water. However, there is nothing so bad but it might be worse. Once is not always, and love overlooks lapses.” Augusta’s persistence that she dared not be “shut up with him alone,” caused Mrs. Ashton to say— “Well, my daughter, the occasion has been so unusual that even your own father has taken more wine than his wont, or he might bear you company. That groom seems a steady man; suppose he rides inside to support his master; and whatever you do, remember when wine is in wit is out, silence is a wife’s safeguard, and you will have to make the best of a bad bargain.” A month back Augusta would have tossed her head, and laughed lightly at her mother’s pet philosophy. That night she rode home from Jabez Clegg’s wedding feast with a groom and a drunken man, pondering whether spirited resentment or tame submission was her best course. The morning dawned on a wife pinched black and blue, with hardly strength or spirit to sob.