“I’ve been opening a bazaar down here,” went on Lady Frances with a determined air of vivacity. “The oddest thing. Do you ever go to bazaars?” “Can’t say,” said Erb cautiously, “that I make a practice of frequenting them.” “Then let me tell you about this. When you open a bazaar you have first to fill your purse with gold, empty it, and then—” Louisa sat, bolt upright, her feet just touching the floor of the carriage, and feeling, as she afterwards intimated, disinclined to call the Prince of Wales her brother. Her ears listened to Lady Frances’s conversation, and she made incoherent replies when an opinion was demanded, but her eyes were alert on one side of the carriage or the other, sparkling with anxiety to encounter someone whom she knew. Nearly everybody turned to look at them, but it was not until they reached the Dun Cow at the corner of Rotherhithe New Road (the hour being now eight o’clock), at a moment when Louisa had begun to tell herself regretfully no one would believe her account of this gratifying and epoch-making event, that into Old Kent Road, chasing each other, came two girls belonging to her factory. The foremost dodged behind a piano-organ that made a fruitless effort to make its insistent jangle heard above the roar and the murmur of traffic; seeing her pursuer stand transfixed, with a cheerful scream of vengeance half finished, she turned her head. At the sight of Louisa bowing with a genteel air of half recognition the first girl staggered back and sat down helplessly on the handles of the piano-organ, jerking that instrument of music and causing the Italian lady with open bodice to remonstrate in the true accents of Clerkenwell. When near to Bricklayers’ Arms Station Louisa saw again her current young man morbid with the thought of a wasted evening, but still waiting hopefully for his _fiancée_, now three hours behind time; the young gentleman’s eyesight being dimmed with resentfulness, it became necessary for her to wave a handkerchief that might, she knew, have been cleaner, and thus engage his attention. At the very last possible moment he signalled astonished acknowledgment.