“Until the gentleman had received a positive and final acceptance, I should imagine such confidence premature.”

Mrs. Palma spoke sternly, and withdrew her fingers from her daughter’s clasp.

“As if there were even a ghost of a doubt as to the final acceptance!  As if I dared play this heavy fish an instant, with such a frail line?  Ah, mamma! don’t tease me by such tactics!  I am but an insignificant mouse, and you and Mr. Congreve are such a grim pair of cats, that I should never venture the faintest squeak.  Don’t roll me under your velvet paws, and pat me playfully, trying to arouse false hopes of escape, when all the while you are resolved to devour me presently.  Don’t!  I am a wiry mouse, proud and sensitive, and some mice, it is said, will not permit insult added to injury.”

“Regina, are you ready?  I shall take you to Mrs. Brompton’s, and it is quite time to start.”

Mrs. Palma looked impatiently at Regina, and as the latter rose to get her hat and wrappings from her own room, she saw the mother lean over the pillows, saw also that the white arms of the girl were quickly thrown up around her neck.

Soon after, she heard the front door-bell ring, and when she started down the steps, Olga called from her room: 

“Come in.  Mamma has to answer a note before she leaves home.  When you go down, please ask Terry to give a half-bottle of that white wine with the bronze seal to Octave, and tell him to make and send up to me as soon as possible a wine-chocolate.  Mrs. Tarrant’s long-promised grand affair comes off to-night, and I must build myself up for the occasion.”

“Are you feverish, Olga?  Your cheeks are such a brilliant scarlet?”

“Only the fever of delicious excitement, which all young ladies of my sentimental temperament are expected to indulge, when assured that the perilous voyage of portionless maidenhood is blissfully ended in the comfortable harbour of affluent matrimony.  Does that feel like ordinary fever?”

She put out her large well-formed hand, and, clasping it between her own, Regina exclaimed: 

“How very cold!  You are ill, or worse still, you are unhappy.  Your heart is not in this marriage.”

“My heart?  It is only an automatic contrivance for propelling the blood through my system, and so long as it keeps me in becoming colour, I have no right to complain.  The theory of hearts entering into connubial contracts, is as effete as Stahl’s Phlogiston!  One of the wisest and wittiest of living authors, recognizing the drift of the age, offers to supply a great public need, by—­’A new proposition and suited to the tendencies of modern civilization, namely, to establish a universal Matrimonial Agency, as well ordered as the Bourse of Paris, and the London Stock Exchange.  What is more useful and justifiable than a Bourse for affairs?  Is not marriage an affair?  Is anything else considered in it but the proper proportions?  Are not these