"Very well." He placed the vase back upon the table and walked to the door. "Mademoiselle," he said, making her a low bow, "I am infinitely obliged to you;" and then, without another word, he opened the door and was gone. Three minutes later Mrs. Hazeldine came in. She was just back from her drive. She found Vera lying back exhausted and breathless in an arm-chair. "My dear, what have you done to Monsieur D'Arblet? I met him running out of the house like a madman, and laughing to himself like a little fiend. He nearly knocked me down. What has happened! Have you accepted him?" "No, I have refused him," gasped Vera; "but, thank God, I have saved your 'Long Eliza,' Cissy!" Early the following morning one of Mrs. Hazeldine's servants was despatched in a hansom with a small brown paper parcel and a note to the Charing Cross Hotel. During the night watches Miss Nevill had been seized with misgivings concerning the mysterious mission wherewith she had been charged. But the servant, the parcel, and the note all returned together just as they had been sent. "Monsieur D'Arblet has left town, Miss; he went by the tidal train last night on his way to the Continent, and has left no address." So Vera tore up her own note, and locked up the offending parcel in her dressing-case. CHAPTER XXIX. A WEDDING TOUR. Thus Grief still treads upon the heels of Pleasure; Married in haste, we may repent at leisure. Congreve. We all know that weddings are as old as the world, but who is it that invented wedding tours? Owing to what delusion were they first instituted? For a wedding feast there is a reasonable cause, just as there is for a funeral luncheon, or a christening dinner. There has been in each instance a trying ordeal to be gone through in a public church. It is quite right that there should be eating and drinking, and a certain amount of jollification afterwards amongst the unoffending guests who have been dragged in as spectators on the occasion. But why on earth, when the day is over, cannot the unhappy couple be left alone to eat a Darby-and-Joan dinner together in the house in which they propose to live, and return peacefully on the morrow to the avocation of their daily lives? Why must they be sent off amid a shower of rice and shabby satin shoes into an enforced banishment from the society of their fellow-creatures, and so thrown upon each other that, in nine cases out of ten, for want of something better to do, they have learnt the way to quarrel, tooth and nail, before the week is out?