visible as her charms, whose strength was latent and unsuspected. It was not to be supposed that a girl like Katharine--handsome, clever, dashing, and independent in her ideas and manners, of a not precisely-to-be-defined position in society, and with a not-exactly-to-be-commended father--should escape sharp and not kind or altogether candid criticism. She was very much admired; she commanded admiration indeed, however reluctantly accorded; and men liked her very much, even men who were not in love with her, and with whom she did not take the trouble to flirt. Women did not like her; and yet the girl gave them no fair excuse for their prejudice. She was not a determined coquette, conquering and monopolising; she was not rudely inattentive to women, as "beauties" and "blues" usually are: she was smiling and agreeable, and perfectly indifferent to them all; and, with a host of acquaintances, had but one female friend, her aunt Mrs. Stanbourne. With Lady Henmarsh, who was a distant relative on her father's side, Katharine lived on terms of great intimacy,--the lady was indeed her constant, her official _chaperone_,--but it was an intimacy of the kind which more frequently precludes than includes friendship. Lady Henmarsh was a woman of the world, in every possible meaning and extent of the term. She was the exact opposite of Mrs. Stanbourne, in manners, mind, tastes, opinions, and principles; and she disliked Mrs. Stanbourne so cordially, that she might have endeavoured to influence Katharine in a contrary direction to that of her wishes, simply to annoy that lady; but she was saved from any thing so unphilosophical by the fact that it suited her in every way to appoint herself high-priestess of Miss Guyon's world-worship. As no one ever saw, and many had never heard of Lady Henmarsh's husband, it was a pardonable mistake, frequently made by strangers, to suppose that she was a widow. This, however, was not the case. A miserable invalid--whose migrations, if not quite confined to Goldsmith's _itinéraire_, were only from his dull house in Hampshire to his dull house in Cavendish Square; a cross, palsied, querulous old man, called Sir Timothy Henmarsh, who had long since lapsed out of the sight and the memory of society--still existed, not altogether to the displeasure of his lady, who would be seriously impoverished by his death; existed in a condition of illness and suffering which rendered it indispensable that his wife should, in deference to what society calls common decency, provide herself with some further excuse for her neglect of him, and her constant presence at gay and festive scenes of every description, than the real, but unproduceable one, that she liked dissipation and disliked him. Lady Henmarsh and Mr. Guyon had been very good friends indeed in former days, when he was a young widower, thoroughly consoled, and Hetty Lorimer was a pretty portionless girl, who knew that she had nothing to look to but marriage, and that if she