“Do you ever think of old times?  Do you remember the old house, and the fun we used to have? and the tutor whom you pelted with horse-chestnuts when you were a little girl?  And those cracker bonbons, and the motto we drew—­

     ’My heart is thine. 
     Wilt thou be mine?’”

She smiled, and lifted her eyes ("blue as the sky, and bright as the stars,” he thought) to his, and answered “Yes.”

Then the bonbon motto was avenged, and there was silence.  Eloquent, perfect, complete, beautiful silence!  Only the wind sighed through the fragrant willows, the stream rippled, the stars shone, and in the neighbouring copse the nightingale sang, and sang, and sang.

* * * * *

When the white end of the cracker came into the young lady’s hand, she was full of admiration for the fine raised pattern.  As she held it between her fingers it suddenly struck her that she had discovered what the tutor’s fragrant smoke smelt like.  It was like the scent of orange-flowers, and had certainly a soporific effect upon the senses.  She felt very sleepy, and as she stroked the shiny surface of the cracker she found herself thinking it was very soft for paper, and then rousing herself with a start, and wondering at her own folly in speaking thus of the white silk in which she was dressed, and of which she was holding up the skirt between her finger and thumb, as if she were dancing a minuet.

“It’s grandmamma’s egg-shell brocade!” she cried.  “Oh, Grandmamma!  Have you given it to me?  That lovely old thing!  But I thought it was the family wedding-dress, and that I was not to have it till I was a bride.”

“And so you are, my dear.  And a fairer bride the sun never shone on,” sobbed the old lady, who was kissing and blessing her, and wishing her, in the words of the old formula—­

         “Health to wear it,
          Strength to tear it,
       And money to buy another.”

“There is no hope for the last two things, you know,” said the young girl; “for I am sure that the flag that braved a thousand years was not half so strong as your brocade; and as to buying another, there are none to be bought in these degenerate days.”

The old lady’s reply was probably very gracious, for she liked to be complimented on the virtues of old things in general, and of her egg-shell brocade in particular.  But of what she said her granddaughter heard nothing.  With the strange irregularity of dreams, she found herself, she knew not how, in the old church.  It was true.  She was a bride, standing there with old friends and old associations thick around her, on the threshold of a new life.  The sun shone through the stained glass of the windows, and illuminated the brocade, whose old-fashioned stiffness so became her childish beauty, and flung a thousand new tints over her sunny hair, and drew so powerful a fragrance from the orange-blossom with which it