being divided with great clothes-maids, over which Crosby’s men were tacking red flannel; very dark and odd it seemed; it quite bewildered me, and I was going on behind the screens, in my absence of mind, when a gentleman (quite the gentleman, I can assure you) stepped forwards and asked if I had any business he could arrange for me.  He spoke such pretty broken English, I could not help thinking of Thaddeus of Warsaw, and the Hungarian Brothers, and Santo Sebastiani; and while I was busy picturing his past life to myself, he had bowed me out of the room.  But wait a minute!  You have not heard half my story yet!  I was going downstairs, when who should I meet but Betty’s second-cousin.  So, of course, I stopped to speak to her for Betty’s sake; and she told me that I had really seen the conjuror—­the gentleman who spoke broken English was Signor Brunoni himself.  Just at this moment he passed us on the stairs, making such a graceful bow! in reply to which I dropped a curtsey—­all foreigners have such polite manners, one catches something of it.  But when he had gone downstairs, I bethought me that I had dropped my glove in the Assembly Room (it was safe in my muff all the time, but I never found it till afterwards); so I went back, and, just as I was creeping up the passage left on one side of the great screen that goes nearly across the room, who should I see but the very same gentleman that had met me before, and passed me on the stairs, coming now forwards from the inner part of the room, to which there is no entrance—­you remember, Miss Matty—­and just repeating, in his pretty broken English, the inquiry if I had any business there--I don’t mean that he put it quite so bluntly, but he seemed very determined that I should not pass the screen—­so, of course, I explained about my glove, which, curiously enough, I found at that very moment.”

Miss Pole, then, had seen the conjuror—­the real, live conjuror! and numerous were the questions we all asked her.  “Had he a beard?” “Was he young, or old?” “Fair, or dark?” “Did he look”—­ (unable to shape my question prudently, I put it in another form)—­ “How did he look?” In short, Miss Pole was the heroine of the evening, owing to her morning’s encounter.  If she was not the rose (that is to say the conjuror) she had been near it.

Conjuration, sleight of hand, magic, witchcraft, were the subjects of the evening.  Miss Pole was slightly sceptical, and inclined to think there might be a scientific solution found for even the proceedings of the Witch of Endor.  Mrs Forrester believed everything, from ghosts to death-watches.  Miss Matty ranged between the two—­always convinced by the last speaker.  I think she was naturally more inclined to Mrs Forrester’s side, but a desire of proving herself a worthy sister to Miss Jenkyns kept her equally balanced—­Miss Jenkyns, who would never allow a servant to call the little rolls of tallow that formed themselves round candles “winding-sheets,” but insisted on their being spoken of as “roley-poleys!” A sister of hers to be superstitious!  It would never do.