Babiole laughed, much relieved. She evidently retained such a vivid impression of the thoughts which had preyed upon her excited mind on the previous evening that she was tormented by the fear or the dim remembrance of having given them expression. She now looked with awakening interest at the odd collection on the table. 'Are you making preparations for a fancy bazaar, Mr. Maude?' she asked, taking up a case which contained a gold thimble. But she knew what the exhibition meant, and she was glad, though neither of us looked at the other as she put this question, and I made my answer. 'No; the bazaar is over, and these are the things left on my hands.' 'Then I am afraid--the bazaar--has not been very successful?' she hazarded playfully, but in a rather unsteady voice. 'Not very. My customers were discontented with their bargain, and wanted their money back.' Babiole's sensitive face flushed suddenly with hot indignation. 'How dare she----' she began passionately, and stopped. 'My dear Mrs. Scott, these girls dare anything!' said I lightly, in high spirits at the warmth with which she took up my cause. 'There is no respect left for the superior sex now that ladies out-read us, out-write us, outshoot us, and out-fish us. And the end of it is that I wash my hands of them, and have made up my mind to die a bachelor!' If she could have known how clearly her fair eyes showed me every succeeding emotion of her heart and thought of her brain, as I glanced with apparent carelessness at her face while I spoke, she would have died of shame. I had thought, on that night when I met her in London when she had charmed and yet pained me by her brilliant, graceful, but somewhat artificial manner, that she was changed, that I should have to learn my Babiole over again. But it was only the pretty little closed doors I had seen outside her shut-up heart. When the heart was called to, the doors flew open, and here was the treasure exposed again to every touch, so that I had read in her mobile face indignation, affection, jealousy, sympathy, and finally contentment, before she remarked in a very demure and indifferent manner-- 'On the whole I am not sorry, Mr. Maude, that it is broken off. She wasn't half good enough for you.' 'Not good enough for me?' I cried in affected surprise. I was thirsting for her pretty praises. 'I'm sure everybody who knew me thought me a very lucky man.' 'Nobody who knew both well could have thought that,' she answered very quietly. 'Wasn't she rude to mamma, whom you treated as if she were a queen? Is she not hard and overbearing in her manner to you, who have offered her the greatest honour you could give? And wasn't she, for all the cold charity she prides herself upon, distant and contemptuous to me when she knew I had been the object of _your_ charity for seven years?' 'Not charity, child----'