"How silly you are! If things go on as they are going now, I shall be too old to have any bridesmaids at all, by the time we are married." "Well, I don't know how things could go much faster, but I believe you would like to be married in a whirlwind. Now, it seems to me it would have been quite dreadful if you had not had these little hitches and impediments. Why should you be different from other people?" "I hope you will have them yourself, and then you will know they are not so agreeable." "But I did not say they were agreeable," said Winifred, her voice taking a changed tone. "Only that they are such small things in comparison--" "In comparison with what? I don't understand,--I don't think you understand yourself," Marion exclaimed impatiently. "O yes, I do," Winifred said confidently, but without further explanation. Marion was not the person to whom she could have breathed a word of the little visions that trooped up softly as she spoke,-- innocent womanly visions, coming and going with a tender grace. She only looked out towards the shining streak of sea and smiled. Somebody opened the gate at the bottom of the field, waved his hat, and began to clamber lazily towards the two girls,--a big man, with long limbs and high shoulders. Winifred jumped up with a little relief when she saw him, and nodded and beckoned at once as if he needed to be shown where they were. "How did you find us, Frank?" she called out. "Parker told me you were somewhere about. Women always give themselves so much trouble before they can do anything comfortable, that I knew I should find you at the highest point of the place." He came straggling up, and stretched himself on the grass with an air of contentment. The lark had finished its song, and dropped silently into the grass; the wind was freshening, blowing back Winifred's hair, and stirring her face into colour;--everything was full of delicious, strong beauty. Winifred looked down at her cousin and smiled, perhaps at the sight of his brown, good-tempered eyes. "Now that you are come, you shall tell us what you have been doing," she said, not sorry to lead Marion's thoughts away from the road of unavailing regrets. "Doing? I have been walking through the mud. That is what you all do here always, isn't it? I met an old woman who told me a great deal more about cider than I ever knew before, and a man--O, by the way, Winifred, that is what I wanted to ask you--who is a short man, rather deformed, with a powerful face, and strong religious opinions?" "It must have been David Stephens, Anthony's bugbear," said Winifred. Other people's bugbears often strike one curiously in an opposite light. Frank repeated the word a little wonderingly.