city soap-boiler's family, who shall paint? "Awake my muse" and--but,
no! it passeth all telling. They bowed down before him (figuratively),
this good British tradesman and his fat wife, and worshipped him. They
burned incense at his shrine; they adored the ground he walked on;
they snubbed their neighbors, and held their chins at an altitude
never attained by the family of Dobb before. And in six weeks Miss
Ethel Dobb became Lady Catheron.

It was the quietest, the dullest, the most secret of weddings--not a
soul present except Papa and Mamma Dobb, a military swell in the
grenadier guards--Pythias, at present, to Sir Victor's Damon--the
parson, and the pew-opener. He was madly in love, but he was ashamed
of the family soap-boiling, and he was afraid of his cousin Inez.

He told them a vague story enough of family matters, etc., that
rendered secrecy for the present necessary, and nobody cross-questioned
the baronet. That the parson was a parson, the marriage _bona fide_,
his daughter "my lady," and himself the prospective grandfather of
many baronets, was enough for the honest soap-boiler.

For the bride herself, she said little, in a shy, faltering little way.
She was very fond of her dashing, high-born, impulsive lover, and very
well content not to come into the full blaze and dazzle of high life
just yet. If any other romance had ever figured in her simple life,
_the_ story was finished and done with, the book read and put away.

He took her to Switzerland, to Germany, to Southern France, keeping
well out of the way of other tourists, and ten months followed--ten
months of such exquisite, unalloyed bliss, as rarely falls to mortal
man. Unalloyed, did I say? Well, not quite, since earth and heaven are