the bride has been down to an early breakfast, and has gone up again to put their best clothes on. The maid servants are hurrying about the house in uniform grey gowns and white caps, all except the ladies' maids, who have the right of exercising individual will in the choice of their magnificence. The footmen have new liveries. The wedding-breakfast is laid out in the dining-room; I have been reconnoitring it. One has to look out of window to assure oneself that the season is winter. On the long glittering table summer and autumn hold their scented sway. Regiments of tall flowers-both white and vivid-coloured; shady fern forests; bunches of grapes, big as those fabulous ones swinging in gilt over an ale-house door, or as that mighty cluster represented in the illustrations to 'Line upon Line,' as borne between two stout Hebrews, slung upon a pole ; odorous rough-skinned pines. I indulge in a pleased sigh, and glance at the carte. I draw a slight mental sketch of what my own share in the banquet will be. Truly, one waxes gluttonous in one's old age.

Since then I have been pervading such of the ladies' rooms as intimacy gives me the entrée to. I have seen twelve passably fair maids, in twelve gauzy bonnets, each with a murdered robin sitting on the top, as a delicate tribute to the season. Pretty and clean and white the dozen look; but, alas! they will present but a drabby-grey appearance by-and-by out of doors, when contrasted with the wonderful blinding snow-sheet. I am not a bridesmaid; I have not been invited, nor, if I had, would I have consented to intrude the washedout pallor of my face among this plump pink rose garden.

Now I have returned to the bride chamber, where Sylvia, fully dressed, and apparently labouring under some hallucination as to being herself the bride, has usurped the cheval glass; at least, on my entry, I find a pretty little figure in violet velvet and swansdown, with bust protruded and semi-dislocated neck, gyrating slowly before it.

"How extraordinary one does feel in colours!" she is ejaculating, with a sort of uneasy complacency; "but for Lenore's sake, nothing should have induced me. I feel quite like a fish out of water; I really can hardly believe it is my own face-it seems like some one else's. What a fright one does look, Jemima!"

No contradiction from me.

"Does not one?"

"No, I don't think so," reply I, consolingly; "nothing out of the way. I don't see much difference."

"Violet always used to be considered my colour," returns Sylvia, apparently finding my form of comfort not very palatable "always, par excellence. How well I remember, the very last ball I ever went to with poor Tom-I was in violet lisse, with cowslips-overhearing

some man ask, 'Who that lovely little woman in mauve was?' What I was in !"

a rage

"And who was she?" ask I, with interest.

"Who was she?" (reddening). "What stupid questions you do. ask, Jemima! Who was she? Why I, of course."

"Mauve suits everybody, even me," say I, peeping over Sylvia's shoulder at my own unusual lilac splendour, "it was well-named the refuge of the destitute."

Having discharged this Parthian shaft I turn away. The room is blocked with great imperials, packed and half-packed. A whole haberdasher's shop of finery is surging out of them, and a big white L. S. is on each of their shiny black lids. L. S. herself sits before the dressing-table, but difficult as it is to help it-she is not looking at herself in the glass. Her eyes are on the ground and her brows gathered. She is fully dressed, with the exception of the wreath and veil;-all dead white-dead white, like the doll on the top of a twelfth-night cake; only that the doll invariably compensates for the colourlessness of her attire by cheeks that outshine the peony, and Lenore's cheeks are dead white too. To my mortification, I perceive, that in spite of Worth's gown, and old Mrs. Scrope's Flemish point, my sister is looking as little handsome as a thoroughly goodlooking woman ever can look. Hardly a touch of pretty red, even on her lips, and a pinched blue look of cold and utter apathy about her face and whole attitude.

"If I am to arrange your wreath," say I, speaking sharply, "we had better begin; there is no use hurrying, and it takes some time to dispose it properly."

She does not move or change her position.

"Will you be good enough," continue I, ironically, "to look round and convince yourself that this is not a funeral?"

Still no answer.

66

Lenore" (raising my voice), "are you dead? are you dumb? are you cataleptic? For heaven's sake, why do you not say something?"

"What should I say?" she answers at length, raising her heavy eyes, and speaking with harsh irritability; "why should I speak? I have only one hour more of my own now" (glancing with a sort of tremulous shudder towards the clock); "surely I may spend it as I like."

"That is better," rejoin I, not heeding the matter of her speech, but regarding her, with my head on one side, with an artist's eye. "When you speak you look ten per cent. better. I must tell you in confidence that as you sat just now, with your shoulders up to your ears and your nose resting on your knees, you had a near escape of being that anomaly in nature, a plain bride."

No reply.

"For mercy's sake, say something," I cry, crossly; "do not lapse again into that utter silence! Dear me!" (taking the wreath gingerly out of its box) "how beautifully they do make these things nowadays! But for the scent, I really think they out-do nature."

The wheels of the first carriage become audible; very faintly, by reason of the snow, but still audible, and Sylvia, after one final glance, shuffle, and whisk, swims out of the room. I become absorbed in an artistic agony, as I throw the lace, in a shower of costly flimsiness, over my sister's impassive head, and delicately insinuate the chilly nuptial flowers into their resting-place on the top of it.

Carriage after carriage rolls up: doors are opened; steps let down. My curiosity gets the better of me. I leave my nearly finished task, and, running to the window, press my face against the frosted pane.

"The Websters," say I, narratively. "Ha! ha! ha! Old Mrs. Webster in a twin gown to Sylvia; even to the swansdown on the body and tunic! Poor dear Sylvia! she will never get over it; it will be the death of her."

As I stand there, laughing maliciously, I feel a hand on my shoulder. "What! are you come to look at them, too? Take care, they will see you. It shows a little want of imagination in Mrs. James making two dresses pin for pin alike, does not it?"

I turn towards her; but, as soon as I catch a glimpse of her face my mirth dies, and I utter a horrified ejaculation. It is lividly white, and she is gasping.

"Open it wide!" she says, almost inaudibly. “I—I—I am stifling!"

"Good heavens!" cry I, apprehensively and dissuasively, with my usual practical grasp of a subject. "You are not going to faint? Do not!-not till I get you a chair. You are so heavy-I never could hold you up.

As I speak I am struggling with the hasp of the window, which is old, rusty, and evidently constructed with a view to never opening except after ten minutes of angry wrestling.

66

Quick! quick!" she says, faintly panting, "wider! wider!"

But it is too late. As the frozen casement grates slowly on its hinges, her head, with all its smart paraphernalia of lace and flowers, falls back lifeless, and the whole weight of her body, in all the leaden inertness of Death's counterfeit, rests in my strained arms. No one knows, until they have tried it, how heavy dead and swooned persons are. I stagger under my sister's weight, and with much difficulty, and many bumps both to her and myself, get her down on the floor, where the little icy airs come and ruffle her useless laces and her soft tossed locks. Then I fly to the bell, open the door, and call mightily down the passage. "Louise!" I cry, "Louise !" as Sylvia's French maid comes floating airily along-not in the least hurrying herself,

but rather throwing gallantries over her shoulder, as it were, to a strange valet in the middle distance. "Louise! Louise! Make haste! Mademoiselle Lenore is so ill! I do not know what has happened to her!-all of a sudden, too!-she has fainted, I think; I suppose it is a faint, is not it?" (looking nervously in her face) "not anything worse?"

Louise gives a little yell, and says "My God!" in her mother tongue, in which flippant language that adjuration does not sound half so solemn. Then we kneel down, one on each side of her, sprinkle water in her face, considerably to the injury of her tucker-pour brandy down her unconscious throat-hold strong smelling-salts to her nostrils-roughly chafe her dead hands-use all the unpleasant asperities, in fact, that are supposed necessary to induce people to come back to that life which, as a rule, they are so loth to quit. But it is all to no purpose: she shows no sign of returning consciousness.

"I do not half like it," I say, looking apprehensively across at my coadjutor, and speaking in an unintentional whisper. "I have not a notion what to do next! Run, Louise, and tell John to go as quickly as he can for Dr. Riley-and-and-I do not like being left here by myself with her-send Mrs. Prodgers."

"What do you want with me?" cries Sylvia, pettishly, coming fussing in, a minute or two later; evidently in complete ignorance of the errand on which I have sent for her..

"I wish you would not send such mysterious messages. I am so nervous already that I do not know what to do with myself! I declare, just now, when Lord Sligo was talking to me, I had no more idea what he was saying- -Good God!" (catching sight of Lenore's stiff prostrate white figure), "what has happened? What has she done to herself now ?"

"She has fainted," repeat I, briefly, "all of a sudden, before I could look round; and we cannot bring her to."

"Good gracious, how dreadful!" cries Sylvia, kneeling daintily down on the floor too, not however, before she has plucked up her violet velvet skirts. "What does one do when people faint?-put cold keys down their backs-cut their stay-laces-hold looking glasses before their mouths-oh no, of course, that is to see whether they are-heavens, Jemima," (her face blanching), "you do not think she

Mrs. Prodgers has an inveterate aversion for pronouncing the little four-lettered word, that, in its plain shortness, expresses the destiny of the nations.

"Nonsense!" cry I, angrily, again seizing the salts, and futilely holding them to her nose.

"Feel whether her heart beats," says Sylvia, looking very white, breathing rather short, and speaking in an awed whisper. "I am

afraid to do it myself-I dare not !-you are feeling the wrong side, are not you?—they say it is nearly in the middle."

Complying with these anatomical instructions, I feel. Yes, it beats. Life's little hammer is still knocking feebly against its neighbour ribs. "She will be all right, just now, of course; it is only that we are not used to this sort of things. I never was the least frightened myself," say I, doughtily, but not altogether truly.

"I wish her eyes were quite shut," says Sylvia, peering into Lenore's swooned face with the horrified curiosity of a child; "they look so dreadful showing a bit of the pupil."

"The wedding will have to be put off, of course," say I, rising, and walking towards the clock; "half-past eleven now; it is very certain that she will not be well enough to be married before twelve."

"But the people!" cries my sister, squatting in a dismayed purple heap on the floor, for the moment utterly oblivious of nervousness, swansdown, or even of the aptness of velvet to crease, unless sat upon straight. "They are all come; everybody is dressed; most of them are already at the church; the bishop has been there half an hour." I shake my head. "It cannot be helped."

"And the breakfast!" cries Mrs. Prodgers, as a fresh and worse aspect of the calamity presents itself to her mind. "Of course, the cold things do not matter; they will be as good to-morrow or the day after as to-day; but the soups, the entrées !"

I stifle a sigh. "There is no good in talking of it," I say, with forced philosophy. "You had better go at once and send them all

there is no use in keeping them waiting in the cold. Charlie, too" (with an accent of compassion); "poor boy! what a bitter disappointment it will be to him!"

"As to that," says Sophia, with a slight relapse into the preening I and Pouter-pigeon mood, "I do not suppose that a day's delay will kill him men are often not sorry for a little reprieve in these cases. am sure no one can feel more thoroughly upset than I do; if I were to follow my own inclinations I should sit down and have a good cry."

"Do not follow them then," I say brusquely, " or, at least, send the guests away first, and cry as much as you please afterwards."

By the aid of Louise, and with many appeals on her part to the French God, skies, and Virgin, I, heavily and with difficulty, lift Hours have passed, the doctor has come, Lenore on to the bed. Sylvia has resumed her black gown and giant rosary, the last carriage has rolled away with snowy wheels, before Lenore lifts the quivering white of her lids, and looks round upon us languidly, one after another. There are only three of us-the elderly doctor, to whom from our earliest infancy we have been in the habit of exhibiting our tongues and pulses, I, who am nobody, and thirdly, a poor young man in a