'Told me!' repeats the elder woman, with a withering intonation; 'not he!--trust him for that! No doubt he has some high-falutin' reason for not doing so; it would wound my feelings!--it would be dangerous at my age! He had rather efface himself and his own interests for ever than roughen, by one additional pebble, my path to the grave!' mimicking, with ludicrous insuccess, Freddy's round young tones. 'Told me?--not he!' The tinge brought into Peggy's face by that emotion of transient satisfaction of which milady's words have proved the fallaciousness, dies out of it again. 'Nobody has told me,' continues the old lady tranquilly; 'I have only taken the liberty of seeing what was directly under my nose. No offence to you, Peggy; but I had quite as soon not have seen it.' 'Of course--of course,' replies Peggy, flushing again. 'I suppose that we have no one but ourselves to thank,' says milady, with philosophy, her eye returning affectionately to one of the designs for the front of her hobby. 'I do not care about that one; it is too florid--it would look like Rosherville. Throw two selfish idle young fools together, and the result has been the same since Adam's time!' Peggy's heart swells. Idle and selfish! Never, even in the most secret depths of her own mind, has she connected such epithets with her Prue; and here is milady applying them to her as if they were truisms. 'I must send him away somewhere, I suppose,' pursues Lady Roupell, with a rather impatient sigh. 'He is an expensive luxury, is Master Freddy, as your poor little Prue would find; but no doubt it will come cheaper in the end. Give him a couple of hundred pounds, and pack him off on a voyage round the world! Believe me, dear,' laying her hand--whose tan, contracted by an inveterate aversion for gloves, contrasts oddly with its flashing diamonds--compassionately on Peggy's shoulder, 'he would have clean forgotten her before he had got out of the chops of the Channel.' A great lump has sprung into Peggy's throat, constricting the muscles. 'And she?' The old woman shrugs her shoulders. 'When we are forgotten, child, we do the graceful thing, and forget too. I suppose we all know a little about that.' Margaret has picked up one of the Dutch tiles that are to line the walls of milady's new plaything; but it is but a blurred view that she gets of its uncouth blue figures. 'She would not forget,' she says in a low voice, that, low as it is, has yet been won with difficulty from that seeming mountain in her throat; 'she has put all--everything into one boat! Oh! poor Prue, to have put everything into one boat!' 'And such a boat!' adds milady expressively.