only when bedtime came, did she sit down on the floor at her mother's feet, and tell her of this new fact, not the details, those she never told. There had sprung up in her, if nothing else, at least SO much reticent loyalty to the man who loved her.

In so short a time it was all done,-the great step made. She had pledged herself to marry a man she knew very little, and did not love, for what? She could not have told if she had tried, she was such a child at heart. I think it was as she might have leapt a five-barred gate, or taught herself Sanskrit, for fun.

There is of course no defending the morality of this, but it is but fair to Ida to remark that many marriages are made for baser motives. She was very young, and did not know what love meant; and even in the long past days of Lalla Rookh and Hugh, she had never connected love and marriage in her life.

Never, though, did a girl marry longing more thoroughly to do her duty, and to make her husband happy. Her mind only grasped the externals, the outer shell of the matter, and she never thought of being happy herself, or perhaps some instinct might have warned her of danger.

CHAPTER VI.

EARLY DAYS.

THE engagement caused a great deal of talk between the people who were very much surprised and those who had expected it all along. Of the latter was Mr. Garnett. He was, now it was settled, both pleased and displeased: pleased that Ida, his niece, should get so good a husband, but was rather doubtful if she was fit to be wife to Craven.

"Such a child as she is, after all!" he said. "I hope he has not gone and made a fool of himself. He always was a queer fellow, just taken up with the last people you would expect." And the remembrance of the time when "Craven's nigger" was an excellent station joke at Delhi, seemed very dire confirmation of this.

He did not stop to consider that much good and no harm had come of that strange.

friendship, nor did he see that there was, after all, not very much resemblance between the two facts. But to tell the truth, to Mr. Garnett, accustomed to the barndoor neatness and tameness of his own girls, Ida, with her brighter plumage, her command of foreign tongues, and tongues, and her solitary, independent ways, was, in the world of girls, almost as strange a choice as Saadut Khan had been as a man friend; and Arthur was not a man who vouchsafed much by way of explanation to any one, on any matter that closely touched himself.

"I hope he has not made a fool of himself," he said again, when Arthur had gone off to Maple Bank after breakfast, and the great news had been told to the girls. He had heard it from Craven over their cigars late the previous evening, and now, he added, "I suppose he knows what he wants," and like the really good-natured fellow he was, said no further doubtful words on the subject.

Bygrave thought

We know what Mrs.

of the matter; she was quite pleased, and not the least alarmed.

insight, and a

Jack, with more more unworldly standard, did feel very considerable alarm, and expressed himself very strongly in private to his mother.

"Do you know, mother," he said, "I think it is a crying shame to marry Ida to Craven. Not that I have any fault to find with him; he's a good fellow I don't doubt; but Ida does not care a straw about him. She did not quite know how to say No, that is the whole truth of it. The girl is barely sixteen. It is an awful risk. What if she meets some one else, by-and-by, that she does care about?"

Mrs. Bygrave did not like criticism, and had before now, with Jack, found quite the most convenient way of meeting his comments was to be offended with them, irritation doing nearly as well as argu

ment.