"There is one comfort. She is exceedingly intelligent, quick, and receptive. She will learn very fast," he told himself. One evening, at Niagara, when they sat together admiring the glorious falls by moonlight, she said to him, curiously: "You said once that if you could have chosen my name, it would not have been Marie. Tell me what you would have called me?" Turning to her with a smile, he replied: "The name that I always fancied I should like for my wife to bear was the sweet one of Una--no sweeter, I know, than Marie, but I grew to love the name from reading Spenser's 'Faëry Queen.'" Then he told her the pretty story, as well as he could, of the beautiful Una who personified Truth in the "Faëry Queen." She listened with sparkling eyes and eager interest. "From this hour I shall be called Una," she exclaimed. "But you have been baptized Marie," he said. "It shall be Una Marie, then," she replied, in her pretty, positive fashion, and he was pleased to assent. "From this hour, then, I shall call you Una, and you shall call me Eliot." "But, monsieur--" deprecatingly. "No more monsieurs," he replied, playfully. "They remind me too much of Madame Lorraine." "It shall be Eliot, then, always," answered the little bride. CHAPTER XXVII. Bryant Van Zandt was as much surprised and displeased as his brother had expected on the reception of the letter announcing his marriage. "Eliot had no right to do it. He promised our mother, before she died, to stay single and care for the girls until they had homes of their own!" he exclaimed, vexedly, to his wife, to whom he imparted the shocking news before breaking it to his sisters. Mrs. Van Zandt was a blonde of the very palest type. "Her skin it was milk-white, Her hair it was lint-white, Bright was the blue of her soft rolling eye." She was about twenty-eight, but looked younger through her fairness. She was rather pretty and petite, and, in her tasteful garb of blue and white, looked like an animated bisque doll. But her color took a warmer tint than usual just now, and frowning darkly, she exclaimed: "It was a shame for Eliot to go and make such a goose of himself. It would not have been so bad if he had married a girl with money, as you did, but to go and add another burden to the family is outrageous, I declare! What ever will the girls say?" "They will be very angry, I am sure," said the lawyer; but when it was told to them, they did not make as much ado as their sister-in-law. They looked grave and sorry, indeed, but Maud, the elder, said, sensibly: "It is very bad, but indeed, Bryant, I do not see how Eliot could have acted otherwise. _Noblesse oblige_, you know." It was the motto that had ruled the lives of the Van Zandts for generations, and Bryant could not say one word; but his wife made a little _moue_ of disdain.