'There is nothing I should like better!' cries Lady Betty friskily. 'You are looking perfectly delightful to-night; all the more so because your fender is quite on one side. Come now, do not be ill-natured, but make room for me; you know I am not very----' Peggy hears the voice break off abruptly; and involuntarily her eyes, hitherto glued to the back of the chair in front of her, snatch a hasty glance in Lady Betty's direction. She has turned away, and is addressing Mr. Hartley in an altered and hurried key. 'After all, I hope you will not think me very changeable, but I believe I should like to sit a little farther back; one sees better, and hears better, and gets a better general idea.' 'She is going away!' whispers Prue, with a long quivering sigh of relief. 'Oh, I was so frightened! I thought she was going to take my chair. Why did she go? She could not have seen us!' But this is not quite the conclusion arrived at by Peggy, as her eyes follow Betty's retreating figure--Betty, with her 'Little head Sunning with curls' that go to bed in a box--Betty, with the docile Harborough and a couple of Guardsmen at her heels; and--without John Talbot! That for one chance evening she should happen to lack his attendance is, after all, but small evidence against his being still riveted with her fetters; but Peggy's heart swells with a disproportionate elation at the discovery. There is, alas! not much likelihood of poor Prue's feeling a like expansion; for scarcely has she finished drawing the long breath caused her by Betty's retreat, than the seat which the latter had spared is approached, settled upon, and irrevocably occupied--poor Prue's barriers politely but ruthlessly swept away. She has attempted a hurried protest, but it has not been even heard; and now it is too late, for a bell has rung. The curtain has swept aloft, with less of hesitation and dubiousness as to the result than is generally the case with amateur curtains, and discloses to view the second Miss Hartley seated under the rustic berceau of a wayside Italian wine-shop, in peasant's cap and bodice, soliloquising rather nervously and at some length. What is the drift of that soliloquy; or of the dialogue that follows with a person of a bandit nature, whom it takes some moments for his acquaintance to decipher into a young man Hartley; or of the jiggy catchy songs with which the piece is freely interspersed, Peggy will never know to her last day.