the huge old four-poster to be filled with packed and corded trunks—Alice's all, from the imperial down to the bonnet-box.
Is she going away? She has nowhere to go to. An awful thought strikes me, and I sit down on the floor, valance in hand, to follow it up. Can she be going to run away? She has no money. Ah! but Charles Lovelace has, and I read of a couple the other day who, after wasting apart for six months, ran away and got married, and became fat directly. But then their governors weren't a patch upon ours. Alice never can be meditating anything so desperate as that.
As I sit ruminating, she herself comes in and sits down opposite me—a charming figure in her winter gown of dark blue, with the snowy Quakerish kerchief and apron of muslin.
"Alice," I say, lifting the valance and pointing at the assemblage of boxes, "are you going away?"
She looks at me considering.
"I did not want you to know, Nell," she says, "but as you have found it out it can't be helped. I am going to be married."
"Married!" I repeat. "Oh, Alice!"
She looks such a child, as she sits yonder, to wear a wedding ring on her finger and be called Mrs., and order the dinner.
"It is all his fault," she says, nodding towards a distant field where we can see the governor harrying his workpeople. "There is nothing else to be done!"
There is a clouded, sorrowful look in her blue eyes; lovely bits of colour that savants say are becoming year by year more rare,—the dark brown and slate slowly, but surely, hustling the saucy azure off the human countenance.
"Charles says it would have gone on like this for ever, and that we may as well get it over now as in a year's time. If I stayed here much longer, Nell, I should die!"
"Dear love!" I say, jumping up and running to her. "Well, it will be wretched without you—disgusting" (the tears trickle down
