“I’ll be bound you are!” returned the old lady ferociously. “How old is he?” continued her undaunted questioner. “Not much younger than you are yourself,” was the brutal reply, “within a year or so of thirty.” “Oh, you dear old thing!” cried Belle, with a somewhat dangerous gleam in her eye, but a playful wave of her paper, “you always must have your little joke.” Miss Dopping detested Belle’s familiarities; she would almost as soon have had her nose pulled as be called “a dear old thing.” She was on the verge of some savage retort, when Mrs. Finny, who was still romantic, exclaimed pathetically: “He is so handsome in his photograph, so dark and soldierly looking--just a darling fellow.” “Then he does not take after his dear mamma,” sneered Maria. “She is so pale and faded, she always reminds _me_ of a white rat.” “She has had enough to fade her, poor soul,” said Mrs. Redmond. “She has suffered for her folly. Now I may tell you, without vanity, that in my day, I was a young woman of remarkable personal attractions. I was quite a toast, and I was called the ‘Lily of Lippendale.’” (It required a strong effort of the imagination to suppose that this bulky old lady, with a very sallow complexion, could ever have been the Lily of anywhere.) “I had poems written about me, and people used to wait outside our house to see me pass, and yet, though quite a girlish widow, I would never listen to a second suitor.” Here Miss Finny sniffed incredulously, and her mother said: “I wonder if Mr. Holroyd will see many changes.” “To be sure he will,” snapped Maria; “why wouldn’t he? He will see the Major redder and stouter, his mother whiter and thinner, Cuckoo as ugly as one of her own young namesakes, and Denis, an idle ne’er-do-weel, sponging on his family, and playing spoil five in the stables.” “Don’t you find it very cold over there?” screamed Miss Dopping, suddenly addressing a figure in a distant window. A girl who was ripping some article of dress by the fading daylight, looked up and glanced interrogatively at Mrs. Redmond. “Yes, Betty, my darling, I am sure you cannot see any longer; you must be perished; come to the fire.” In answer to this invitation, Betty approached and stretched a pair of thin red hands towards the blaze. She was tall and slender, and had a low, broad forehead, delicate features, and quantities of bright brown hair. To a superficial observer, she was merely a gaunt, pale, shabby girl, who looked both cold and cross, and not to be named in the same year with our pretty, sparkling Belle, who was toasting her toes so comfortably on the fender. But when the sun lit up the golden tints of her magnificent hair; when the wind gave her white cheeks a wild rose tinge; when a smile illuminated her fathomless grey eyes, Betty, too, had her admirers.