“Both,” said Mr. Tallant. “Yes, sir; what wine will you take, sir?” “Sherry,” said Mr. Tallant. “Yes, sir.” And the son of the dead merchant commenced his luncheon. Before he had finished, the same servant brought him a note from Miss Tallant, which enclosed a letter to Twyzell and Kits. “That’s all right,” he said to himself; “give my love to Miss Tallant, say I am greatly obliged to her, and that she need not give herself any further trouble in the matter.” “Yes, sir.” Poor Amy! She had not counted upon this new feature of difficulty in her scheme of ambition and revenge. But she was resolved that nothing should frustrate the accomplishment of the whole scheme which she had planned out. She was betrothed to Lord Verner, and she would marry him at any sacrifice, ay, even to standing at the altar with Mr. Richard Tallant in the paternal and brotherly position he had mentioned. It was rather singular that Richard Tallant as he returned to town that day should have thought so much about this same contingency. “Why should I not be one of the wedding guests?” he said, as he smoked and waited for the next train at Orford Junction. “Why should I not give her away?” CHAPTER XIV. OF HAPPY DAYS IN SPRING. And these were the happy days of the courtship of Phœbe and Arthur. They came with the spring blossoms, opening up a bright new future to both. Yes, happy days, perfectly happy. Philosophy says there is no perfect happiness. Mr. Williamson would smile with quiet amazement at your simplicity if you held that anybody had been perfectly happy, even for an hour. But then, you know, he had been hit in his early days, and the remembrance of his own transient approach to a sense of happiness may have embittered his later existence. Arthur Phillips, a year ago, would have entered into an abstract argument with you upon the subject. He would have told you, with Guizot, that the study of art perhaps contained the highest elements of happiness; that, in the abstract, it was altogether unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. Although he would have told you that Guizot’s charming views about the study of art did not always apply to the practice of it, he would have defended his opinion of the unselfishness of a pure taste for the beautiful in art, and demonstrated to you that it brought into play and had the power of exciting the deepest emotions, gratifying both the nobler and softer parts of our nature,--the imagination and the judgment, love of emotion and power of reflection, the enthusiasm and the critical faculty, the senses and the reason;--but the painter would have sighed as he quoted this enthusiastic commendation of art, and thought how far short all this was from perfect happiness.