resembled the descriptions of Madame de Pompadour in her youth, before she had seen and captivated the great-grandson of the Grand Monarque. She was mignonne, no other word will express it. Her strong points were her pink and white complexion, her masses of wavy golden hair, her dark eyebrows and her magnificent hazel eyes; those dark dreamy eyes in which lurked latent fires. Young as she was, Lucy well knew how to use those eyes, and the way in which she gazed into the face of her cousin's betrothed seemed to detract nothing from his happiness. But in the same way she gazed into Spunyarn's face, it was not mere looking, it was "gazing." So she had gazed into the local general-practitioner's eyes when that poor young man looked at her tongue for the first time. It was Lucy Warrender's burning glance that had temporarily made the village doctor a discontented man, and had caused him to style his mid-day hashed mutton "muck."

In direct contrast, too, to her cousin's, was Lucy's mind. She was not a girl who could be loved by other girls. Save when employed in "gazing" she never looked any one straight in the face. The servants, our stern and acute judges, said that "Miss Lucy wasn't to be trusted, but that Miss Georgie was as good as gold." As usual, the servants were right.

"Unsuccessful again, Lord Spunyarn," said Lucy, dropping him an ironical courtesy, and making a provoking little moue.

"As usual, and I suppose my own fault, though my last serious failure was certainly not my fault, but entirely due to you, Miss Warrender."

"It was certainly not your lordship's misfortune," smiled the young lady.

Haggard and his fiancée seemed to have a good deal to say to each other, but probably like that of most engaged persons, their conversation was merely childish.

And now the little crowd of players and spectators came to make their adieux. For in the country people still retain the fashion of bidding their hosts good-bye. Nay, more, they are in the habit of even thanking them for their entertainment, and for the pleasure they have received: whereas your fashionable, having had all there is to have, and eaten and drank of what seemeth unto him good, carefully rejecting the less recherché viands, simply disappears. He was, and is not.

The Warrender girls were surrounded by a cluster of artless maidens; these shook hands and kissed, after the manner of their kind, and as they were more or less intimate with their hostesses. "He is perfect, quite perfect," whispered the rector's romantic sister, as she squeezed Georgie's hand, "but, oh, I do hope that you are sure of his principles, Georgie, dear, for in marriage so much depends, dear, upon principles." As Haggard's only principles were his personal comfort, filliped by the gentle stimulus of frequent flirtations, was Georgie quite right in replying, "Oh, dear Miss Dodd, I am quite sure of his principles?" Gradually the miscellaneous gathering took its departure. No man or male person left the premises without one of Lucy's fatal œillades; each one of the stronger sex, too, received a rather more than necessary pressure of her soft and dimpled hand. Many among the elders, nay, the patriarchs even, felt their pulses quicken at the unexpected pressure and the sly bright glances; it made them feel, not as if they were smitten with the good looks of Lucy Warrender, but as if she herself had been captivated by the prepossessing appearance and manners of each special victim. That was the art of it.

The dinner that evening at The Warren was a cheerful one; the humours of the day were described with biting satire by the gentle Lucy. She it was who had cruelly incited the stout vicar to elephantine gambols, to the intense disgust and annoyance of his angular wife. Who but Lucy could have caused the coldness between young farmer Wurzel and his affianced bride, Miss Grains, the brewer's daughter? Who but Lucy, as she sat on the shafts of the horse-roller, listening with apparently rapt attention to the lucubrations of young Wurzel on the subject of shorthorns. Perhaps the clasped hands and the ecstatic look were hardly necessary, for even so interesting a subject as stockbreeding. But Lucy had noted, out of the corner of her watchful eye, the arrival of Miss Grains, indignant and perspiring.

"You'll excuse him, Miss Warrender, it's more thoughtlessness than want of manners; but he oughtn't to be taking up your time like this," cried the brewer's daughter, as she bore off her reluctant prize. To this day nothing will ever persuade the buxom mother of farmer Wurzel's fine young family that her William was not actually audacious enough to propose to Miss Lucy Warrender, and that his attentions were favourably received. So often has poor William Wurzel been twitted on this matter that he has come to look upon himself as a very Lothario, rescued at the right moment.

In the drawing-room things went on much as they always do in country drawing-rooms in the hot weather. The girls sang; Miss Hood, their chaperon, played the inevitable Chopin; but (as, unlike zoophites, chaperons cannot be cut in two pieces, and yet live) Miss Hood felt it her duty to leave Lucy, and to follow into the verandah Haggard and his fiancée. Perhaps, after all, this may have been rather a relief to the lovers, for they had had a long innings that day, no one having presumed to disturb the numerous têtes-à-tête of the engaged couple.

Squire Warrender sat asleep in his chair, his face covered by a big brown bandanna, so that actually Spunyarn and Lucy were practically alone. But the young lord didn't attempt to renew his attentions to Lucy. In his own mind Spunyarn perhaps felt that he was well out of it. Lucy, a past-mistress in the art of flirtation, was delicious as a friend; as a sweetheart there would have been two sides to the question; but Lucy Warrender as a wife would have been simply appalling and impossible. Lucy's bygone escapade with her uncle's second footman—for failing high game, Lucy Warrender was not above captivating even a second footman—had been carefully hushed up. It was the cause of the poor young man's receiving a month's wages on the spot and his dismissal. For Miss Hood had detected him in passing a very pink-looking letter to Lucy Warrender. Pinker far than the letter were the face and ears of the guilty domestic, as he placed the intercepted missive in Miss Hood's hands, on her sternly ordering him to do so. Of course the letter was shown to Mr. Warrender; he was very angry under the circumstances. But the letter of the unfortunate Joseph, though it had caused him many agonies in its composition, was comic in the extreme. It was full of what the writer called "pottery;" it was the poor young fellow's first love letter. Alas, it was a mere answer to a letter of Lucy's; she had commenced the correspondence; it was she who had thrown the handkerchief.

Needless to say Lucy was deported at once, and Madame Planchette's, née Jones, finishing establishment in the Champs Elyseés received a fresh pupil. Lucy's minauderies could now only be practised on her own sex. But even there the girl succeeded in setting the whole house by the ears; and causing the sudden dismissal of the Italian professor, a gifted Piedmontese, with a gigantic head of black curly hair and long but dirty nails. At the end of a year she returned to