Then there was my lady, sitting at the top of her table, the very picture of a courteous, affable, well-bred hostess; perhaps, if anything, a little too placid and immovable in her outward demeanour. Who would have guessed at the wild and stormy passions that could rage beneath so calm a surface? Who would suppose that stately, reserved, majestic-looking woman had the recklessness of a brigand and the caprices of a child? A physiognomist might have marked the traces of strong feelings in her deepened eyes and the lines about her mouth--damages done by the hurricane, that years of calm can never repair; but there had been a page or two in Lady Scapegrace's life that, with all his acuteness, would have astonished Lavater himself. Then there was Miss Molasses, the pink of propriety and "what-would-mamma-say" young ladyism--cold as a statue, and, as old Chaucer says, "upright as a bolt," but all the time over head and ears in love with Frank Lovell, and ready to do anything he asked her at a moment's notice. There was Frank himself, gay and _debonnair_: outwardly the lightest-hearted man in the company; inwardly, I have reason to know, tormented with misgivings and stung by self-reproach. Playing a double game--attached to one woman and courting another, despising himself thoroughly the while; hemmed in by difficulties and loaded with debt, hampered by a bad book on "The Two Thousand," and playing hide-and-seek even now with the Jews--Frank's real existence was very different from the one he showed his friends. So with the rest of the party. Old Mrs. Molasses was bothered by her maid; Mr. Lumley puzzled by his beetles; his wife involved in a thousand schemes of mischief-making, which kept her in perpetual hot water: all, even honest Cousin John, were sedulously hiding their real thoughts from their companions; all were playing the game with counters, of which indeed they were lavish enough; but had you asked for a bit of sterling coin, fresh from the Mint and stamped with the impress of truth, they would have buttoned their pockets closer than ever--ay, though you had been bankrupt and penniless, they would have seen you further first, and _then they wouldn't_.