When this couple entered the dining-room, Mrs. Lenny felt proudly that she had achieved one of the successes of her life. Lady Markham looking up at her as she marched in on her husband’s arm, with flowers rustling on her cap and lace on her shoulders, gave one look of bewildered admiration, Mrs. Lenny thought, then glanced at Alice to communicate her wonder. (“I knew she’d think I’d brought my whole wardrobe,” she said to the colonel after, “and for that matter, that is fit to be seen, so I have.”) The “evening body,” the lace, and the ribbons took Lady Markham altogether by surprise; and it cannot be said that her own simple toilet was appreciated by her visitor. But Mrs. Lenny was very kind after dinner, and explained the simple artifice to her hostess, by way of giving a lesson to one of the best dressed of women. “You look very nice in your muslin, my dear,” she said, “and so does that pretty darling, that would look well in anything; but when you come to my time of life it makes a difference; and roaming about from place to place how could I have room for muslins? not to say that washing is a ruination. I have one evening body made with good black silk. It costs a little more at the time, but what does that matter? And there you are, both for morning and evening, quite set up.” “It is a very admirable plan, I am sure,” Lady Markham said, with great seriousness, checking with a look the laugh that was in Alice’s eyes. The children were in the drawing-room, all four of them, very ready to make friends with their beloved colonel’s wife. “I feel as if I had something to do with them. I feel as if I were their grandmother, though I never had a child of my own,” she said. Thus everything went harmoniously in the drawing-room, though the ladies were all a little curious to know what kept the gentlemen so long over their wine. Sir William’s coffee grew cold; he had never been known to be so late before. CHAPTER IX. “They’re talking over old days,” Mrs. Lenny had said three or four times before the gentlemen appeared. What could be more natural? No doubt they had gone from recollection to recollection: “Do you remember” this and that, and “what happened to” so-and-so? It was very easy to imagine what they were talking about, and how they got led on from one subject to another. They were heard talking, when they at last appeared, all the way up the long drawing-room, pausing at the door. “All died out, I believe,” Colonel Lenny was saying. “The last son lost his children one after another, and died himself at the last broken-hearted, poor man! The daughters were all scattered--but Katey knows more about them than I do.” “I am really afraid to ask any more questions,” Sir William said. What more natural?