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248 while Hilda was to go back to The Spaniards almost immediately, to collect her belongings, and make herself ready for her new life. All the business of furnishing could be done after the wedding, in that interval which the young couple were to spend at Penmorval.

Hilda was up in time to watch from her bedroom window while her lover rode away in the misty morning; but she was much too shy to go downstairs and wish him good-bye. She would have quailed before the awful eye of Stodden, the butler, had she ventured to show herself at such an unseemly hour, unchaperoned, unsanctioned by the presence of a matron. So she hid behind the window-curtain, and watched her true knight's departure, and did not even fling him a flower by way of love-token.

When horse and rider were out of sight, Hilda went to her desk and wrote to her brother, urging him to come back without delay, explaining and apologising for the early date named for her wedding—reminding him as to her marriage-settlement that she wished Bothwell to profit as much as possible by her small independence—an altogether womanly letter, brimming over with love for her betrothed.

She went home that morning, and she and Fräulein Meyerstein began immediately to busy themselves with preparations for the wedding. It would naturally be the quietest of weddings, since Mr. Wyllard's condition forbade all festivity. Hilda said she would have the twins for her bridesmaids, and no others. They were to be dressed exactly alike, and all in pure white, like biscuit-china figures; they were to have little Pompadour frocks and petticoats and mob-caps. There was a tremendous consultation that Monday afternoon with the chief dressmaker of Bodmin, a person of high reputation among those steady old-fashioned people who liked to spend their money in their own town, and who were naturally looked down upon by that other section of county society which had all its clothes from London or Paris. The dressmaker had made Hilda's frocks ever since she was a baby, and was inclined to be doleful at the idea of this trousseaux-less entrance into matrimony; but on being put upon her mettle she declared that the neat little white satin wedding-gown and the handy little olive cloth travelling-gown should be perfection after their kind; and then came a lengthy discussion about sleeves and velvet waistcoat, and the all-important question of buttons was treated exhaustively. Miss Pittman, the dressmaker, had been told of Doré and of Redfern, and had lain awake of a night thinking of their productions; she had been shown dresses from Swan & Edgar and from Lewis & Allenby; but she believed that for the hang of a skirt or the fit of a sleeve she could hold her own with any house in London. And then she favoured Hilda and the Fräulein with a little lecture upon