Sylvia dear, I wish I hadn't meddled; I'm meddling some more I suppose when I say to you, don't give Howard his conge for the present.

It is a horridly common thing to dwell upon, but Howard is too materially important to be cut adrift on the impulse of the moment." "I know it." "You are too clever not to.

Consider the matter wisely, dispassionately, intelligently, dear; then if by April you simply can't stand it--talk the thing over with me again," she ended rather vaguely and wistfully; for it had been her heart's desire to wed Sylvia's beauty and Quarrier's fortune, and the suitability of the one for the other was apparent enough to make even sterner moralists wobbly in their creed.

Quarrier, as a detail of modern human architecture, she supposed might fit in somewhere, and took that for granted in laying the corner stone for her fairy palace which Sylvia was to inhabit.

And now!--oh, vexation!--the neglected but essentially constructive detail of human architecture had buckled, knocking the dream palace and its princess and its splendour about her ears.
"Things never happen in real life," she observed plaintively; "only romances have plots where things work out.