“Are you really a--a countess?” Beth asked, staring wide-eyed at Lady Harrowdene when she was thus goaded to speak. Lady Harrowdene laughed delightedly. “You funny little thing!” she cried. “Is that what is the trouble? Shall we stop playing Queen Mary and her attendants and talk in our proper persons? Thank you; making believe is a bit hard to keep up long. I think my title is all right. Why do you question it? My husband is Lord William Bellair, Earl of Harrowdene. Doesn’t that make me a countess, quite securely?” “Yes, ma’am. Yes, my lady. I don’t know even how to say yes to a countess! I didn’t really believe there were countesses and earls, not _feel_ I believed them, till this minute!” cried Beth in a burst of a sort of despair of meeting this occasion properly. Lady Harrowdene laughed so heartily that the tears sprang to her eyes. “Why do you care so much about them, my dear? Aren’t you a true little American republican, believing--what is it that your Declaration of Independence says? That all men are created equal? Why, then, do you care about a title?” cried this merry countess when she recovered her breath. “It’s not that,” Beth tried bravely to explain. “It’s not the way the Declaration meant, I care. It’s--it’s so strange, because you read about earls and countesses in books and they always seem so--interesting. Almost like fairies, only nicer, I think. And it doesn’t seem as though they could be just going around now. Are your children earls and countesses?” “My oldest boy will be Harrowdene some day. My girl--she’s not as old as you are--is the Honorable Constantia Bellair, because her father is an earl. We call her Con, Connie, usually, quite as you are called Beth. It really doesn’t matter about these things as much as you fancy, my dear. I see, though, that it is the romance of it that appeals to you, not the worldly side of noble birth. But I assure you we are not particularly romantic, though I fancy you’d find plenty to enthrall your dreaming little soul in the fine old Elizabethan house at Harrowdene. One day you must see it, when your aunt comes over to return my visit of to-day and brings your lovely cousins, as she has promised to do. They used to call me Honorable Pat, Beth, before I was married, because my father was also an earl. Now they call me Lady Pat, and my husband makes stupid jokes on my name, all about his Pat-ent wife; what a frightful wound he got when my father gave him a Pat--and all that sort of thing, don’t you know? But this is when we are quite in private and it doesn’t matter! I only mention it to show you that an earl is quite merely a mere man! By the way, my dear, an ancestor of mine, on my mother’s side, was one of the noblemen selected to witness the execution of poor Mary Stuart. Pray don’t set that down against me; I’m sure I should have tried to rescue her had I been in his place!”