“I mean to make him ashamed of himself, if he ventures near me!” pursued Mrs. Blyth. “And I shall try if I can’t console him afterwards,” thought Madonna, turning away her head for fear her face should betray her. Another ring at the bell! “There he is, perhaps,” continued Mrs. Blyth, nodding in the direction of the window, as she signed those words. Madonna ran to look: then turned round, and with a comic air of disappointment, hooked her thumbs in the arm-holes of an imaginary waistcoat. Only Mr. Gimble, the picture-dealer, who always criticized works of art with his hands in that position. Just then, a soft knock sounded at Mrs. Blyth’s door; and her father entered, sniffing with a certain perpetual cold of his which nothing could cure--bowing, kissing his hand, and frightened up-stairs by the company, just as his daughter had predicted. “Oh, Lavvie! the Dowager Countess is downstairs, and her ladyship likes the pictures,” exclaimed the old man, snuffling and smiling infirmly in a flutter of nervous glee. “Come and sit down by me, father, and see Madonna doing the visitors. It’s funnier than any play that ever was acted.” “And her ladyship likes the pictures,” repeated the engraver, his poor old watery eyes sparkling with pleasure as he told his little morsel of good news over again, and sat down by the bedside of his favorite child. The rings at the bell began to multiply at compound interest. Madonna was hardly still at the window for a moment, so many were the visitors whose approach up the garden walk it was now necessary for her to signalize. Down-stairs, all the vacant seats left in the painting room were filling rapidly; and the ranks of standers in the back places were getting two-deep already.