"Do you?" said Marie quietly. "Yes, they're going to sell us both--a bargain." "Are they?" said Marie, who was thinking she would like to be sold to Marcus Glen. "Yes, it's going to be like it was in that novel of Georges Sand. We're to be married to rich old men because we are young and beautiful; and if they marry me to one, I'm sorry for the old man." "Do you think so?" "Yes, I do," exclaimed Clotilde: "else why were we dressed up, and sent down to dinner with that old Jew, and that old, yellow Lord Henry Moorpark, when there were those young officers there?" "I don't know," said Marie thoughtfully, as once more her mind reverted to Captain Glen. "Then I do," cried Clotilde, with flashing eyes. "I should like to be married, and have an establishment, and diamonds, and servants; but if they make me marry that dreadful man--" "Well, what?" said Marie, with a depth of thought in her handsome eyes. "You'll see!" cried Clotilde; and thrusting her hand in between the mattress and the palliasse, she dragged out the highly-moral paper-covered French novel that had lain there _perdu_. After the genial thawing of the ice there could be no more such severe and cutting behaviour as that which marked the meeting of Captain Glen and Richard Millet with the Dymcox family; and a day or two later, when the two officers were idling about the broad walks, with the boy's eyes watching in all directions, but only to be disappointed at every turn, they came suddenly upon the party taking their morning walk. "No, my dears," the Honourable Philippa was saying, in reply to a request made by Clotilde; "the park is impassable, for the scenes that take place there are a disgrace to humanity, and the Government ought to be forced to interfere. It is not so very long ago that your aunt and I were thoughtfully walking beneath the trees--that glorious avenue of chestnuts, that we poor occupants of the Palace can only view free from insult at early morn or late in the evening--I say your aunt and I were pensively walking beneath the trees, when we stumbled full upon a coarse-minded crew of people sitting eating and drinking upon the grass, and a dreadful-looking man with a shiny head held up a great stone bottle and wanted us to drink. You remember, Isabella?" "Yes, sister; and we fled down the avenue, to come upon another party engaged in some orgie. They had joined hands in a circle like savages, and one dreadful man was pursuing a woman, whom he captured, and in spite of her shrieks--" "I think we had better not pursue the subject further, Isabella," said the Honourable Philippa; "it is not a seemly one in the presence of young ladies. I need only tell you, my dears, that they were engaged in a rite popular among the lower orders--a sort of sport called `kiss-in-the-ring'." "Hush, sister!" whispered the Honourable Isabella; "the gentlemen."