It was five o’clock before she was at the office, and she had promised to be back in the lodgings at six, to get for him his tea. It was quite out of the question that she should work to-day. “The truth is, ma’am,” she said to the female superintendent, “I have received and accepted an offer of marriage this afternoon. He is going out of town to-night, and I want to be with him before he goes.” This is a plea against which official rigour cannot prevail. I remember once when a young man applied to a saturnine pundit who ruled matters in a certain office for leave of absence for a month to get married. “To get married!” said the saturnine pundit. “Poor fellow! But you must have the leave.” The lady at the telegraph office was no doubt less caustic, and dismissed our Lucy for the day with congratulations rather than pity. She was back at the lodging before her lover, and had borrowed the little back parlour from Mrs. Green, and had spread the tea-things, and herself made the toast in the kitchen before he came. “There’s something I suppose more nor friendship betwixt you and Mr. Hall, and better,” said the landlady smiling. “A great deal better, Mrs. Green,” Lucy had replied, with her face intent upon the toast. “I thought it never could have been that other young lady,” said Mrs. Green. “And now, my dear, about money,” said Abraham as he rose to prepare himself for the journey. Many things had been settled over that meal,--how he was to get a house ready, and was then to say when she should come to him, and how she should bring the boy with her, and how he would have the banns called in the church, and how they would be married as soon as possible after her arrival in the new country. “And now, my dear, about money?” She had to take it at last. “Yes,” she said, “it is right that I should have things fit to come to you in. It is right that you shouldn’t be disgraced.” “I’d marry you in a sack from the poor-house, if it were necessary,” he said with vehemence. “As it is not necessary, it shall not be so. I will get things;--but they shall belong to you always; and I will not wear them till the day that I also shall belong to you.” She went with him that night to the station, and kissed him openly as she parted from him on the platform. There was nothing in her love now of which she was ashamed. How, after some necessary interval, she followed him down into Gloucestershire, and how she became his wife standing opposite to him in the bright raiment which his liberality had supplied, and how she became as good a wife as ever blessed a man’s household, need hardly here be told. That Miss Wilson recovered her health and married the hairdresser may be accepted by all anxious readers as an undoubted fact. ALICE DUGDALE. CHAPTER I. THE DOCTOR’S FAMILY.