into dainty satin slippers, and it seems a thousand pities the fair ones can't "receive" in the peignoirs that are so undeniably becoming.

'Really!" utters Mrs. Craven in a tone of genuine chagrin, as she contemplates the long meshes of her golden hair against the firelight. "It's a great shame when one has good hair not to be able to show it; of course I know men think it's only put on, and the women who haven't got good hair always try to make them believe everyone else's artificial. That horrid Mrs. Carlton told Captain Gore she was in at Douglas's when I bought mine."

"What does it matter? answers Mrs. Scarlett. "I don't care myself what people think or say."

"What nonsense, Milly! As if you wouldn't like to go about with it all down your back-you know it's magnificent.

When we were at Biarritz last year, I wanted to let mine down because people said it was false, only that disagreeable, provoking Harry wouldn't let me."

"I suppose he doesn't want anyone else to admire it."

Mrs. Craven makes a contemptuous little

moue.

"As if he cared! I might wear a wig for aught he knows. Now and then, when I'm trailing it out before the glass, he says, in his gruff way, 'Don't be so vain, Laura,’ and when I ask him, just in fun, if it isn't lovely, he only remarks, 'It's a good deal too long, and not the colour he likes'-as if your husband knew or cared a bit if were a Venus when youv'e been married to him five years! What fools women are to marry!" with a little vicious jerk of the brush. "Oh, Milly, what a goose you and how sorry you'll be for it!"

are,

you

"I!" echoes Mrs. Scarlett, gazing into the fire with a bright look stealing into her eyes. "No, I don't think I shall."

"Only consider all you're going to give up! Here you are at five and twenty, your own mistress, well off, living in London, with heaps of men in love with you. Oh, how I wish I was a widow! I don't mean that I want Harry to die; of course it would make me wretched anything happening to him, but if I could only have married some rich old man I hated, who would have died and left me all his money, oh, how happy I should be! How I wish I was a widow!"

66

'It's not such a very enviable position," Mrs. Scarlett interrupts bitterly.

"You know, Milly," proceeds Laura oracularly, "I've completely thrown myself Of course I am pretty, I need not have any false modesty with you, for you

away.

flatter me as much as anyone; if I hadn't been goose enough to marry Mr. Craven I should been enjoying myselfmost thoroughly now. Of course I should have no end of men in love with me, as you have."

66

A great many more, I should hope," interrupts Milly.

"Well, I should be quite satisfied with as many. But now I'm married, as soon as men get too attentive, I'm obliged to assume an air of iced propriety, because, whatever people may say, I don't flirt. Do I? And you-well you had four letters this very morning; I recognised the writing of two, and I knew the monograms of the others. All full of protestations and despair, of course, eh, Milly ?" and Mrs. Craven laughs her pretty but rather vacant laugh.

"Now just look at me, shut up in a dull country place month after month, with hardly any society, and a husband who is

farming all day, and goes to sleep and snores regularly every evening after dinner. If he'd only let me come up to town for the season-but no! just three weeks to the very day is all I get of London, though he knows I adore it; and then he prowls about all the time, looking as if it would be his death. Men are so abominably selfish. Sometimes, Milly-I daresay you won't believe it, because I'm always cheerful and happy when you're with me-but sometimes

I

cry for a whole day together; and when Harry comes in, though he sits opposite me at dinner, he never even sees that my eyes are red. We don't quarrel, and I daresay people quote us as a model pair, because our names are never coupled with anybody else, but" and a long sigh, a wistful glance in the fire, finish the sentence.

"Everyone is unhappy, sometimes, I