The girl obeyed without comprehending. It was not often that she understood her lover's meaning, nor did he particularly care that she should understand him. He talked to her rather in the same spirit in which one talks to a faithful canine companion—as Napoleon III. may talk to his favourite Nero; "I have great plans yet unfulfilled, my honest Nero, though you may not be wise enough to guess their nature. And we must have another Boulevard, old fellow; and we must settle that little dispute about Venetia; and we must do something for those unfortunate Poles, eh—good dog?" and so on.

Captain Paget drove straight to a registrar's office, where the new Marriage Act enabled him to unite himself to Miss Kepp sans façon, in presence of the cabman and a woman who had been cleaning the door-step. The Captain went through the brief ceremonial as coolly as if it had been the settlement of a water-rate, and was angered by the tears that poor Mary Anne shed under her cheap black veil. He had forgotten the poetic superstition in favour of a wedding-ring, but he slipped a little onyx ring off his own finger, and put it on the clumsier finger of his bride. It was the last of his jewels—the rejected of the pawnbrokers, who, not being learned in antique intaglios, had condemned the ring as trumpery. There is always something a little ominous in the bridegroom's forgetfulness of that simple golden circle which typifies an eternal union; and a superstitious person might have drawn a sinister augury from the subject of Captain Paget's intaglio, which was a head of Nero—an emperor whose wife was by no means the happiest of women. But as neither Mary Anne nor the registrar, neither the cabman nor the charwoman who had been cleaning the door-step, had ever heard of Nero, and as Horatio Paget was much too indifferent to be superstitious, there was no one to draw evil inferences: and Mary Anne went away with her gentleman husband, proud and happy, with a happiness that was only disturbed now and then by the image of an infuriated mother.

Captain Paget took his bride to some charming apartments in Halfmoon-street, Mayfair; and she was surprised to hear him tell the landlady that he and his wife had just arrived from Devonshire, and that they meant to stay a week or so in London, en passant, before starting for the Continent.

"My wife has spent the best part of her life in the country," said the Captain, "so I suppose I must show her some of the sights of London in spite of the abominable weather. But the deuce of it is, that my servant has misunderstood my directions, and gone on to Paris with the luggage. However, we can set that all straight to-morrow."