“But the game is not finished yet,” added the promoter, next instant; “when it is, Mr. Stewart, you will perhaps find out to your cost which of us rises the winner.” CHAPTER VI. HOLLY BERRIES. The accident at Berrie Down brought, during the course of the few weeks preceding Christmas, an unprecedented number of visitors to the Hollow. Never before in the memory of any individual connected with the establishment had so many carriages, driven up to the door in the course of one day as was the case when once news of Lally’s precarious state came to be bruited abroad. People who had never called on Mrs. Dudley now called to inquire after her child, and there had to be a piece of cork fastened under the knocker, and some baize tied round the clapper of the bell, in order to prevent Heather being maddened by the incessant rat-tat-tat and ting-ting-ting of her neighbours’ grand footmen. Very little social courtesy had been extended to Mrs. Dudley since her marriage. Long before her advent, the Dudleys had dropped off the visiting lists of their more aristocratic acquaintances, and no one felt much inclined to take steps towards reviving the old intimacy when Arthur Dudley brought home to the Hollow a wife of whom no one knew anything, who might, in fact, be “anybody”—as Mrs. Poole Seymour, the great lady of North Kemms, vaguely expressed herself. When society does not take notice of a woman on the occasion of her marriage, it is difficult for any member composing it subsequently to repair that omission; and thus, although there was scarcely a lady in the three parishes who would not willingly enough have extended her countenance to Mrs. Dudley, and although most persons’ consciences pricked them when they passed the Hollow, or met the pretty woman and her children, and the brothers and sisters-in-law whom she had so speedily tamed and civilized, in Berrie Down Lane, still Heather’s circle of acquaintances had remained extremely limited, and might have remained so for many a year longer, had not Lally’s accident broken the conventional ice, and brought, as I have said, visitors and kind inquiries to Berrie Down in abundance.