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BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 339

mate friend of the family. He remembered all the days in which she was specially interested Christmas, the New Year, St. Valentine's, Easter, her birthday, Jenny's birth- day, Walter's birthday. She always said he had excellent taste in the choice of flowers, the binding of books, and the selection of dainty bits of bric-a brae. But Jenny could not forget that Sam had in his speech a suggestion of North Country dialect, and was a little inclined to over- dress, took no pains to cultivate aristocratic society, and was, after all, only a stockbroker ; so that when Philip Forsyth, with his distinguished style and manner, his artistic prospects, his promising position in society, and his notable circle of friends, came along as a rival to Swynford, Mrs. Milbanke took Dolly's future into her hands and brought about the engagement which had ended so disastrously. She now congratulated herself and her three companions on continuing their Italian holiday with the new love, and being entirely off with the old, and confessed to Walter that there was something nobler in life than some of the aims which had engrossed her ambition, upon the sunken rocks of which she had nearly wrecked Dolly's future ; but Walter would not hear of the smallest thought of self-abasement on the part of his pretty and affectionate wife, and he vowed that he had always felt somehow or other that everything would come right for Dolly, although he was anxious to make believe that if anyone was to blame for hastening that un- fortunate engagement it was he himself.

Altogether the party was under the influence of affec- tionate self-denial and mutual congratulation upon the course events had taken. At present they did not, from a sympathetic point of view, feel the shadow of Philip Forsyth's strange disaffection, and they had no knowledge of that sensation which the Ghost of the Lagoons had created in Venice.