"_My_ Miss Maliphant! Really I must protest against your accrediting me with such a possession. But look here, _don't_ disappoint us all; and you won't be dull either, there are lots of people coming. Dicky Brown, for one." "Oh! will he be there?" brightening visibly. "Yes," rather gloomily, and perhaps a little sorry that he has said anything about Mr. Browne's possible arrival--though to feel jealousy about that social butterfly is indeed to sound the depths of folly; "you like him?" "I _love_ him," says Miss Kavanagh promptly and with sufficient enthusiasm to restore hope in the bosom of any man except a lover. "He is blessed indeed," says he stiffly. "Beyond his deserts I can't help thinking. I really think he is the biggest fool I ever met." "Oh! not the biggest, surely," says she, so saucily, and with such a reprehensible tendency towards laughter, that he gives way and laughs too, though unwillingly. "True. I'm a bigger," says he, "but as that is _your_ fault, you should be the last to taunt me with it." "Foolish people always talk folly," says she with an assumption of indifference that does not hide her red cheeks. "Well, go on, who is to be at the Court besides Dicky?" "Lady Swansdown." "I like her too." "But not so well as you like Dicky, _you_ love him according to your own statement." "Don't be matter-of-fact!" says Miss Kavanagh, giving him a well-deserved snub. "Do you always say exactly what you mean?" "Always--to _you_." "I daresay you would be more interesting if you didn't," says she, with a little, lovely smile, that quite spoils the harshness of her words. Of her few faults, perhaps the greatest is, that she seldom knows her own mind, where her lovers are concerned, and will blow hot and cold, and merry and sad, and cheerful, and petulant all in one breath as it were. Poor lovers! they have a hard time of it with her as a rule. But youth is often so, and the cold, still years, as they creep on us, with dull common sense and deadly reason in their train, cure us all too soon of our pretty idle follies. Just now she was bent on rebuffing him, but you see her strength failed her, and she spoiled her effect by the smile she mingled with the rebuff. The smile indeed was so charming that he remembers nothing but it, and so she not only gains nothing, but loses something to the other side. "Well, I'll try to mend all that," says he, but so lovingly, and with such unaffected tenderness, that she quails beneath his glance. Coquette as undoubtedly Nature has made her, she has still so gentle a soul within her bosom that she shrinks from inflicting _actual_ pain. A pang or two, a passing regret to be forgotten the next hour--or at all events in the next change of scene--she is not above imparting, but when people grow earnest like--like Mr. Dysart for example--they grow troublesome. And she hasn't made up her mind to marry, and there are other people----