allowing her to make remarks on more sensitive victims. Sarah and Eliza were in good-natured rapture with the whole show—from the Brussels lace wedding-gown to the very last dozen of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, and they were quite sorry when a summons to coffee took them back to the drawing-room.
"Thirty morning gowns!" whispered Sarah, as they went down stairs. "The idea of a new gown every day for a month. Now I call that real happiness."
"Not such real, lasting happiness," answered Eliza, half laughing, as eighteen bracelets, and then those heaps of gloves and handkerchiefs. A quarter of them, Sarah, would free our miserable allowances from embarrassments for life."
"It must be very pleasant to be so rich———"
"And to be going to be married," said Eliza; and this sage conclusion brought them to the drawing-room door.
Helen would perhaps have given them a different opinion. She began to doubt much whether it were happiness, or anything like it, to be going to be married. She had accepted Lord Teviot on an acquaintance of very few weeks, and that carried on solely in a ball-room or at a breakfast. She knew that her sisters had married in the same way, and were very happy. No one, not even her mother, had seemed to doubt for a moment that Lord Teviot's proposal was to be accepted. And except some slight misgivings as to whether she liked him as much as Amelia had liked Mr. Trevor, she herself had had no distrust as to her future prospects till she came into the country. Then she found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy, engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him. He was always quarrelling with her—at least, so she thought; but the real truth was, that he was desperately in love, and she was not; that he was a man of strong feelings and exacting
