Sudden awe left her hardly any voice for the necessary announcement, and she fled back precipitately to the kitchen. "Cookie!" she exclaimed, sinking into a chair. "Did you ever! Lord Blackborough, 'im as owns half the town an' is as rich as Crees' is--whoever Crees may be!--is in the parlor--such a real gent to look at too. And that ain't all. Missus called 'im 'Ned!' It's for all the world like that lovely tale in the _Penny Cupid_ I was reading last night in bed, only he was a h'earl." Her pert eyes grew tender; she sighed. "Did she now," said Cookie, a lazy-looking, fat lump of a girl, much of the same type. "Poor master! an' he, if you like, is a good-lookin' fellar; but I always did say she wasn't no lady. She haven't any lace on her underclothes--at least none to speak of." Meanwhile, after her first glad incredulous cry of "Ned," Aura had hastily thrust away her work and risen. As she came forward, a world of welcome in her face, in her outstretched hands, Ned Blackborough realised by his swift sense of disappointment how much--despite his own asseverations to the contrary--he had counted on unhappiness. Truly women were kittle cattle. Truly it was ill prophesying for the feminine sex! She was happy, radiantly happy. Her face, if thinner, was infinitely more vivid; if less beautiful in a way it was far more alive. It was this which struck him--the vitality of it--its firm grip on life--its almost exuberant power. It seemed to him as if two souls, two minds, two hearts looked out at him from her eyes. He was no fool. He understood the position in a moment; he knew that love was worsted. "So you are quite happy," he said, still holding her hand. "Happy?" she echoed. "Oh, Ned! I have never been so happy in all my life--everything seems so new, everything seems to go on and on for ever, as if there was no end to interest and pleasure." "I am glad," he said lamely, then added, "I shouldn't have thought----" She followed his eyes, which had wandered to an electric blue paper covered with gigantic poppies of a deeper hue, with a frieze in which positively Brobdingnagian flowers, presumably of the same species, curled themselves in contortions terribly suggestive of a bad pain in their insides.