From which remarks it will readily be concluded that Dolly Gerace was no beauty; further, that she was not merely destitute of good looks, but that she had several undesirable points about her.

These things were the case. Dolly had not a good feature in her face. In person she was small, slight, insignificant; mentally, she was an utter anomaly to those who came in contact with her; while in more serious matters, though born in a Christian land of Christian parents--having been duly baptized and confirmed--being the daughter of a clergyman, and the only living child of a most truly good woman, Dolly was as thorough a little heathen as if she had called a squaw mother--and a brave father.

More so indeed, for then she would have had some settled idea of a certain code of morals and religion.

As matters stood, Dolly, for all she seemed to reverence or respect anything, might have been her own Creator--her own all in all.

Not that any one could accuse her of flippancy, irreverence, undue selfishness, or habitual ill-humour.

She had a want of something, rather than an excess of any evil quality; indeed she had no evil quality, unless an occasional tendency to flame up could be so considered. But then she never flamed up except when her equanimity had been long and sorely tried, and the usual happy brightness of her temper was pleasant as sunshine--as music--as the songs of birds--as the perfume of flowers.

Long before Mortomley came upon the scene, Miss Trebasson had exercised her mind upon the subject of Dolly Gerace.

After much consideration, which ended in leaving her as wise as she was before, it suddenly dawned upon Miss Trebasson that her friend either had been born without a soul or that it had never developed.

From that hour Miss Trebasson treated Dolly with the same sort of tenderness as she might an eminently interesting and attractive infant; and when it was proved to demonstration that Mortomley had fallen in love with the girl, Miss Trebasson, after the first bitterness was over, felt no surprise at his choice.

Beside Dolly, spite of her beauty, her intellect, her ancestors, her titled relations, Leonora Trebasson knew she must look but as a bird of very dull plumage.

Weather, means, the state of the domestic atmosphere, the depression of the home funds, never made any difference to Dolly. Given that you expected her, and she was quite certain to appear crisp, smiling, happy, bright, with nothing to say perhaps particularly worth recording, and yet able to say that nothing in a way which made the time speed by quickly and pleasantly.

Miss Trebasson had no more thought of Dolly as a rival than she might have taken of a kitten or a puppy; and yet when Mortomley lost his heart, being a woman rarely wise and with somewhat of a man's instincts, she understood he had done so for the same reason in great measure as she loved Dolly herself, because the creature was gay, sun-shiny, brimful of life and spirits,--because, in a word, she was Dolly Gerace.

Miss Trebasson had seen Dolly in the dumps,--she had seen Dolly rueful--Dolly in sorrow--Dolly crying fit to break her heart--Dolly living with a father who, though loving, never interfered with her--Dolly living with an aunt who never ceased to interfere; and yet, through all these changes, Dolly left the impression that in the country where she lived a fine climate was the rule, not the exception.

When Mortomley fell in love with Dolly, Miss Trebasson waited curiously, and--she was only human and a woman--anxiously, to see if her friend would at length develope any of those qualities which are supposed, more or less erroneously, to attach to a person destined to exist throughout eternity as well as time, but she watched in vain.

Dolly went through her engagement and her marriage with her customary sun-shiny cheerfulness.

"She _has_ no soul," decided Miss Trebasson, "she does not care for him one bit;" and the tears Miss Trebasson shed that night were very bitter, for she herself had cared for Archibald Mortomley very much, and she doubted greatly whether Dolly Gerace was the wife he ought to have chosen. However, he had chosen her, and there was an end of the matter.

Mr. Trebasson gave her away; Miss Trebasson, Miss Halling, and a couple more young ladies were bridesmaids. Mortomley had been sorely exercised to find a best man, but at length he hit on Henry Werner.

The wedding breakfast was by desire of Lord Darsham held at the Court.

Thus Mortomley came by his wife. A few sentences will explain how she came by her being:--

A certain Mr. Gerace having been presented by his pupil, Lord Darsham, with the family living of Great Dassell, which was not a very great thing after all, being only about three hundred and fifty pounds a year, beside the Vicarage-house and glebe lands, the Reverend Mr. Gerace immediately married an eminently discreet, Christian-minded, and unendowed young governess, for which act he had no excuse to offer except that he loved her.

This justification might have been all very well if, in addition to a tender heart, the clergyman had not possessed a weary list of college debts.

He had been foolish once,--he had to pay for that folly to the last day of his life.

He thought he could do much with his income as vicar of Great Dassell, and yet he was only able to live and go on paying those weary, weary bills till it was impossible for him to do anything more on earth.

Before hope had died out in him a female child was born, and after a serious consultation he and his wife decided to name her Dollabella after a distant relative who had no sons or daughters, but, better than either, a considerable amount of money.

She stood for one of the godmothers, together with Miss Celia Gerace, an aunt of the vicar's, Lord Darsham volunteering the part of godfather.

Dolly had not so much as a spoon from the whole of the trio,--she was wont to state this fact with a certain malicious point in her sentence; but they had all, with the exception of Miss Dollabella, been kind to her,--so kind--better than any number of services of plate, Dolly added with her wonderful rippling laugh.

And she meant it. They had been kind,--every one was kind sooner or later to Dolly.

This was another peculiarity about her friend which puzzled Miss Trebasson; other people professed much gratitude for favours received, even though they spoke with occasional bitterness of those who conferred them; but that was not Dolly's way, she accepted kindness as she accepted unkindness, with an equanimity of feeling which seemed simply incomprehensible.

As she grew older this equanimity increased. She laughed and jested with those about her when they were in pleasant moods; when the reverse was the case, when her aunt Celia took her grand-niece to task for the general sins of the human race, Dolly either left the house as soon as she decently could, or if that were impossible, busied herself about domestic matters or worked with rare industry at whatever article of apparel she was making, till the storm blew over, and the domestic atmosphere was clear once more.

There were those who, knowing Miss Celia's temper, wondered Dolly could live with it and its owner; but if people do not object to rain, bad weather cannot seriously affect their spirits, and accordingly, in spite of the usual inclemency of the climate at Eglantine Cottage, Dolly spent some not unhappy years under its roof.

All the great, passionate, unruly love her untrained nature had yet given to any one, she had laid, the first year she was in her teens, in her father's grave.

The world,--her poor little narrow world, did what it could for the orphan, but, as was natural, failed to sympathize fully in her grief.

That was enough for Dolly. She did not trouble the world with much outward evidence of sorrow after that. The wound closed externally, bled internally. Her bed-room in the roof of Eglantine Cottage, selected by herself because there she was out of the way, the lonely woods around Dassell Court, the alder-trees growing by the trout streams, quiet lanes bordered by wild roses, holly and blackberries, and even quieter fields where the half-horned cattle browsed peacefully,--could have told tales of long weary fits of crying, of broken-hearted inquiries as to why such things should be, of an insensate struggle against the inevitable,--of very, very bad half-hours indeed when Dolly wished she was lying beside her father in Dassell's quiet church-yard.

Time went by; and if the wound was not healed it ceased to bleed at any rate. Life had to be gone through, and Dolly was not one to lengthen the distance between the miles with useless repinings. Though she probably had never read "A Winter's Tale" with sufficient attention to know that

"A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a!"

she seemed to have adopted that couplet for her ensampler.

She might, as Miss Trebasson suspected, have no soul, but she was possessed of a wonderful temper--of a marvellous elasticity.

She took life after the fashion of an amiable cat or dog. If people stroked and patted her, she purred and gambolled for joy; if they were out of sorts she crept away from sight till that mood was past.

She was a lazy little sinner--lazy, that is, in points where other young ladies of her acquaintance were most industrious. She would not practice, she would not sketch, she resolutely refused to read German with any one, and she openly scoffed at two London misses who visiting at the Rectory talked French to each other on the strength of having spent a winter at Paris, imagining the Dassell natives could not understand their satirical sentences.

She commented on their remarks in English, and so put them to the rout.

"I thought you told me you could not speak French?" said the youngest to her.

"Neither I can any better than you," retorted Dolly; "and I do not call _that_ speaking French."

Altogether an unpleasant young person, and yet Miss Trebasson loved her tenderly, and Mortomley as well as he knew how.

"What is the matter with you to-night, Dolly?" asked Miss Celia one evening when her niece had sat longer than usual looking out into the twilight while the spinster indulged in that nap which "saved candles."

"Are not you well? I told you how it would be going out for that long walk in the heat of the day."

"We walked through the woods, aunt, and it was not too hot,--and I am quite well," answered Dolly in her concise manner, still looking out into the gathering night. If she could have seen painted upon that blank background all that was to come, would she have gone forward?

Yes, I think so; I am sure she would. For although Dolly had not been born in the purple, there was not a drop of cowardly blood in her veins.

"Then what is the matter with you?" persisted Miss Celia, who always resented having been permitted to finish her nap in peace.

"I was only thinking, aunt."

"That is a very bad habit, particularly for a young girl like you."

"I do not quite see how young girls can help thinking sometimes any more than old ones," answered Dolly, but there was no flippancy in her tone, if there were in her words. "Aunty, Mr. Mortomley--that gentleman I have told you of, who is so much at the Vicarage and Dassell Court--has asked me to marry him."