NOT HEARD.


That oft-quoted French saying, a mauvais-quart-d'heure, is a pregnant
one, and may apply to small as well as to great worries of life: most of
us know it to our cost. But, rely upon it, one of the very worst is that
when a bride or bridegroom has to make a disagreeable confession to the
other, which ought to have been made before going to church.

Philip Hamlyn was finding it so. Standing over the fire, in their
sitting-room at the Old Ship Hotel at Brighton, his elbow on the
mantelpiece, his hand shading his eyes, he looked down at his wife
sitting opposite him, and disclosed his tale: that when he married her
fifteen days ago he had not been a bachelor, but a widower. There was no
especial reason for his not having told her, save that he hated and
abhorred that earlier period of his life and instinctively shunned its
remembrance.

Sent to India by his friends in the West Indies to make his way in the
world, he entered one of the most important mercantile houses in
Calcutta, purchasing a lucrative post in it. Mixing in the best society,
for his introductions were undeniable, he in course of time met with a
young lady named Pratt, who had come out from England to stay with her
elderly cousins, Captain Pratt and his sister. Philip Hamlyn was caught
by her pretty doll's face, and married her. They called her Dolly: and a
doll she was, by nature as well as by name.

"Marry in haste and repent at leisure," is as true a saying as the
French one. Philip Hamlyn found it so. Of all vain, frivolous, heartless
women, Mrs. Dolly Hamlyn turned out to be about the worst. Just a year