So ended Georgie Warrender's wedding-day. As Lord Hetton had remarked, in engaging herself to Haggard she had done a very plucky thing. Marriage is like Mayonnaise sauce, either a great success or an absolute and entire failure. The materials which are blended together to form a perfect whole are dissimilar and have nothing whatever in common, but once really thoroughly amalgamated the result is very happy. Perhaps the marriage celebrated in King's Warren church may turn out well after all. It is to be feared that like the sauce of sauces in the hands of the inexperienced cook, the result is more than doubtful. Fortunatus, though a good fellow enough, is, like his patroness, notoriously fickle. All we have got to do, however, is to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in our stalls. The overture is over, the curtain is about to rise on the drama of Georgie's married life. We haven't a play bill, and don't know whether we are to listen to some pretty pastoral, to a long three-act farce, dignified by the title of a comedy, or whether we are to be thrilled with horror by a gruesome drama of intrigue, limelight effect, and blood. We haven't even seen a review of the piece; the footlights go up with a jump, and now the curtain rises. Let us watch the players. CHAPTER VII. LORD MAYOR'S DAY. It was Lord Mayor's Day. Haggard and his wife sat in the little drawing-room of their bijou house in May Fair. The room was prettily furnished, and Georgie had often accused herself of extravagance. The regulation chairs and tables of the furnished house had been banished from Mrs. Haggard's drawing-room. It had been a pleasure to choose the various tasteful specimens of the upholsterer's art. The nesting faculty is perhaps even more strongly developed in young married ladies than in birds; young Mrs. Haggard was no exception to this rule. Many had been the happy pilgrimages made by Georgie and her lover, for Haggard was her lover still, to the great firm in Pall Mall and to the world-famed house in Bond Street. "Pick up what you like, my dear, and make our drawing-room, your drawing room, as pretty as you please; nothing can be good enough in the little kingdom in which my Georgie deigns to reign." But sugared compliments and furniture-buying cannot go on for ever. A pile of invitations attested the Haggards' popularity. Dance-giving mammas were anxious to secure the success of their entertainments by obtaining the presence of "lovely Mrs. Haggard." A well-known professional beauty in the heyday of her charms was "sitting-out" at a great ball, the observed of all observers, in a _dos-à-dos causeuse_ with a Royal Highness.