him?"

Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. "Could you marry him?"

Lady Grace waited a moment "Do you mean for Kitty?"

"For himself even—if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you."

Lady Grace had another delay. "Well, he's his awful mother's son."

"Yes—but you wouldn't marry his mother."

"No—but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her."

"Even when," Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, "she so markedly likes you?"

This determined in the girl a fine impatience. "She doesn't 'like' me, she only wants me—which is a very different thing; wants me for my father's so particularly beautiful position, and my mother's so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty."

To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. "I see indeed—for the general immaculate connection."

The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. "Well, we haven't had false notes. We've scarcely even had bad moments."

"Yes, you've been beatific!"—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. "This must be your friend," she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion's visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble's announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.