Addie pulls a long limp plume of hartstongue and branch of "woodbine faintly streaked with red" from the battered leaf of her straw hat, which she pitches lightly over her straggling locks, then gives her pelerine a hasty unmeaning twitch that carries the center hook from the right to the left shoulder, and feels perfectly satisfied with her appearance. Pauline steps in front of her sister, with a request to stand on a troublesome bramble caught in her skirt. Addie without hesitation puts forth a patched unlovely boot, and the other moves forward with a brisk jerk, leaving not only the incumbrance well behind, but also a flounce of muddy lining hanging below her skirt; and thus the descendants of the Sieur de Beaulieu saunter down the High Street, with heads erect, callous, haughtily indifferent to public opinion, looking as it the whole county belonged to them. "Look, mother--look at those poor Lefroys!" cried Miss Ethel Challice, the banker's daughter, as she drives past in her elegantly appointed C-spring landau, perfectly gloved, veiled, and shod. "Aren't they awful? Not a pair of gloves among them! And their boots--elastic sides--what my maid wouldn't wear! Patched at the toes, too! You would never say they were ladies, would you?" "Poor children! They have no mother, you know, darling, and a bad, bad father." "Oh, yes, I know! But he was such a handsome, attractive man! Don't you remember, mother, at Ascot, three years ago, when he asked us to lunch on his drag, and introduced me to Lord Squanderford, how fascinating we all thought him?" Mrs. Challice shrugs her portly shoulders. "Fascinating, but thoroughly unprincipled, my dear. I do pity his poor children. What will become of them, thrown destitute on the world? Well, I have nothing for which to blame myself. I tried to do my best for them; but--whether it was from want of manner or through senseless pride I can not tell--Miss Lefroy did not respond to my attempted civility, and the last day I called--about a year ago--I saw the whole family flying from the house across the wilderness like a crowd of scared savages, when the carriage stopped at the hall door." "Oh, it was all want of manners, of course, mother dear! That poor girl would not know how to receive a visitor or enter a drawing-room. She has never been in any society, you know. All the county people have left off calling on them too; they treated them just in the same way that they treated you. They're perfect savages!" "The second girl promises to be rather good-looking." "Do you think so? She's too gypsified for my taste--looks as if she would be in keeping at a country fair, with a tambourine and a scarlet cap." "She's a remarkably good-looking girl--that's what she is," Mr. Percy Challice puts in, with a knowing smile--"steps out like a thoroughbred, she does. 'Twould be well for you, my dear sister, if you had her action on the pavement."