’How was James to do very well?  Why were my fascinations not to be exercised, as per contract?  I began to suspect the worst, and I was thinking of nothing else while we drove to the premises of the Bulcester Literary Society.  Could Jane have drowned herself out of the way, or taken smallpox, which might ruin her charms?  Well, I had not a large audience, on account of fear of infection, I suppose, and all the people present wore the red badge, like Mr. Warren, only he wore one on each arm.  This somewhat amazed me, but as I had never spoken in public before I was rather in a flutter.  However, I conquered my girlish shyness, and if the audience was not large it was enthusiastic.  When I came to the peroration about wishing them all happy endings and real beginnings of true life, don’t you know, the audience actually rose at me, and cheered like anything.  Then someone proposed, “Three cheers for young Warren,” and they gave them like mad; I did not know why, nor did he:  he looked quite pale.  Then his father, with tears in his voice, proposed a vote of thanks to me, and said that he and the brave hearts of old Bulcester, his old friends and brothers in arms, were once more united; and the people stormed the platform and shook his hand and slapped him on the back.  At last we got out by a back way, where our cab was waiting.  Young Mr. Warren was as puzzled as myself, and his father was greatly overcome and sobbing in a corner.  We got into the house, where people kept arriving, and at last a fine old clerical-looking bird entered with a red badge on one arm and a very pretty girl in white on the other.  She had a red badge too.

’Young Mr. Warren, who was near me when they came in, gave a queer sort of cry, and then I understood!  The girl was his Jane, and she had been vaccinated, also her father, that afternoon, owing to the awful panic the old man got into after reading the evening papers about the smallpox.  The gentleman whom Mr. Warren went to see in the study, just after my arrival, had brought him this gratifying intelligence, and he had sent the gentleman back to ask the Trumans to a High Tea of reconciliation.  The people at the lecture had heard of this, and that was why they cheered so for young Warren, because his affair was as commonly known to all Bulcester as that of Romeo and Juliet at Verona.  They are hearty people at Bulcester, and not without elements of old English romance.

’Old Mr. Warren publicly embraced Jane Truman, and then brought her and presented her to me as James’s bride.  We both cried a little, I think, and then we all sat down to High Tea, and I am scarcely yet the woman I used to be.  It was a height!  And a weight!  And a length!  After tea Mr. Warren made a speech, and said that Bulcester had come back to him, and I was afraid that he would brag dreadfully, but he did not; he was too happy, I think.  And then Mr. Truman made a speech and said that though