Trixy sticks out five fingers carelessly, and he takes them in silence, but he is not bold enough to squeeze them ever so little, and he breathes more freely directly he is outside the big drawing-room door. His broad back turned, Trixy steals out on tip-toe upon the landing, and when he is fairly out of the house, she opens the ivory and ebony box, takes out the two morocco cases, and walking up to the large mirror opposite, she leisurely puts the chain of brilliants and the band of rubies round her snowy throat. Rubies flash in her ears, and a huge bracelet of the same gems gleams blood-red on her rounded arm. For a minute or two she gazes enraptured at herself, then she rushes up the stairs, two steps at a time, like a tomboy, and bursts like a whirlwind into what is called Baby’s school-room. Baby has for some time given up instructive books for more refreshing waters of literature in the shape of French romances; but she still clings, with the small amount of tenacity there is in her nature, to the old ink-stained table and hard chairs, in whose company she tottled up four and four, and invariably made them nine, and wept bitter tears over the dry food provided for her mind by Miss Jenkinson, a staid sanctimonious old spinster that Lady Beranger had picked up out of the _Guardian_, and who, for twenty pounds a year and her laundress, agreed to the herculean task of bringing up the youngest Miss Beranger in the way she should go, so that when she was old she would not depart from it. Alas! Miss Jenkinson’s counsels have fallen on stony ground, for Baby is the biggest young reprobate that ever danced through life in kittenish glee and kittenish mischief. The school-room, now that Miss Jenkinson is gone, probably through worry, to a premature grave, is used as a sort of _omnium gatherum_ for all the Miss Berangers, and here they gather usually when not _en toilette_ and _en evidence_. “Look at me,” cries Trixy in a shrill voice, “and admire me.” And jumping on to the centre of the table she stands with a half-conscious, half-comical expression on her face that elicits a burst of laughter from the other three. “How _can_ old Stubbs make such a fool of himself? He _must_ know you are only marrying him for those things!” Gabrielle says contemptuously. Trixy takes no notice. Gabrielle is not a pet or a pal of hers, and Gabrielle’s wits are too sharp for her. “I say, Zai, what _wouldn’t_ you give for such beauties as these?” “Nothing! I don’t care a bit for jewels, and I wouldn’t accept such costly gifts from a man I did not care about for anything,” Zai answers quietly, going on with her drawing. “Grapes are sour, my lass. The man you _did_ care for might not be able to give you them,” Trixy says spitefully.