‘There’s a tremendous large dinner-party at the House to-night,’ said Emmeline methodically, looking at the equipage over the edge of her teacup, without leaving off sipping.  ’That was Lord Mountclere.  He’s a wicked old man, they say.’

‘Lord Mountclere?’ said Ethelberta musingly.  ’I used to know some friends of his.  In what way is he wicked?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Emmeline, with simplicity.  ’I suppose it is because he breaks the commandments.  But I wonder how a big rich lord can want to steal anything.’  Emmeline’s thoughts of breaking commandments instinctively fell upon the eighth, as being in her ideas the only case wherein the gain could be considered as at all worth the hazard.

Ethelberta said nothing; but Christopher thought that a shade of depression passed over her.

‘Hook back the gate, Joey,’ shouted Emmeline, when the carriage had proceeded up the drive.  ‘There’s more to come.’

Joey did as ordered, and by the time he got indoors another carriage turned in from the public road—­a one-horse brougham this time.

‘I know who that is:  that’s Mr. Ladywell,’ said Emmeline, in the same matter-of-fact tone.  ’He’s been here afore:  he’s a distant relation of the squire’s, and he once gave me sixpence for picking up his gloves.’

‘What shall I live to see?’ murmured the poetess, under her breath, nearly dropping her teacup in an involuntary trepidation, from which she made it a point of dignity to recover in a moment.  Christopher’s eyes, at that exhibition from Ethelberta, entered her own like a pair of lances.  Picotee, seeing Christopher’s quick look of jealousy, became involved in her turn, and grew pale as a lily in her endeavours to conceal the complications to which it gave birth in her poor little breast likewise.

‘You judge me very wrongly,’ said Ethelberta, in answer to Christopher’s hasty look of resentment.

‘In supposing Mr. Ladywell to be a great friend of yours?’ said Christopher, who had in some indescribable way suddenly assumed a right to Ethelberta as his old property.

‘Yes:  for I hardly know him, and certainly do not value him.’

After this there was something in the mutual look of the two, though their words had been private, which did not tend to remove the anguish of fragile Picotee.  Christopher, assured that Ethelberta’s embarrassment had been caused by nothing more than the sense of her odd social subsidence, recovered more bliss than he had lost, and regarded calmly the profile of young Ladywell between the two windows of his brougham as it passed the open cottage door, bearing him along unconscious as the dead of the nearness of his beloved one, and of the sad buffoonery that fate, fortune, and the guardian angels had been playing with Ethelberta of late.  He recognized the face as that of the young man whom he had encountered when watching Ethelberta’s window from Rookington Park.