A slender woman, with red-brown hair and faded cheeks, came running from the house to the gate. “At last, my dear Deborah! I vow I had given you up! Says I to Mirabell an hour ago,--you know that is my name for Charles, for ’twas when he played Mirabell to my Millamant that we fell in love,--‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ll lay a gold-furbelowed scarf to a yard of oznaburg that Mr. Darden, riding home through the night, and in liquor, perhaps, has fallen and broken his neck, and Deborah can’t come.’ And says Mirabell--But la, my dear, there you stand in your safeguard, and I’m keeping the gate shut on you! Come in. Come in, Audrey. Why, you’ve grown to be a woman! You were just a brown slip of a thing, that Lady Day, two years ago, that I spent with Deborah. Come in the both of you. There are cakes and a bottle of Madeira.” Audrey fastened the horse against the time that Darden should remember to send for it, and then followed the ex-waiting-woman and the former queen of a company of strollers up a grassy path and through a little green door into a pleasant room, where grape leaves wreathed the windows and cast their shadows upon a sanded floor. At one end of the room stood a great, rudely built cabinet, and before it a long table, strewn with an orderly litter of such slender articles of apparel as silk and tissue scarfs, gauze hoods, breast knots, silk stockings, and embroidered gloves. Mistress Deborah must needs run and examine these at once, and Mistress Mary Stagg, wife of the lessee, manager, and principal actor of the Williamsburgh theatre, looked complacently over her shoulder. The minister’s wife sighed again, this time with envy. “What with the theatre, and the bowling green, and tea in your summer-house, and dancing lessons, and the sale of these fine things, you and Charles must turn a pretty penny! The luck that some folk have! _You_ were always fortunate, Mary.” Mistress Stagg did not deny the imputation. But she was a kindly soul, who had not forgotten the gift of my Lady Squander’s pink alamode. The chocolate stain had not been so very large. “I’ve laid by a pretty piece of sarcenet of which to make you a capuchin,” she said promptly. “Now, here’s the wine. Shan’t we go into the garden, and sip it there? Peggy,” to the black girl holding a salver, “put the cake and wine on the table in the arbor; then sit here by the window, and call me if any come. My dear Deborah, I doubt if I have so much as a ribbon left by the end of the week. The town is that gay! I says to Mirabell this morning, says I, ‘Lord, my dear, it a’most puts me in mind of Bath!’ And Mirabell says--But here’s the garden door. Now, isn’t it cool and pleasant out here? Audrey may gather us some grapes. Yes, they’re very fine, full bunches; it has been a bounteous year.”