“I’m glad to see you, miss,” she said to Lady Bell, proceeding in grossly illiterate language, which first shocked, then tickled the delicate ears that listened to it. “You’re a coming to a dull part, I would have you to know that, and no mistake; you see ‘I never was known to lie,’ no more than the man as told the funny story of the Ram of Derbyshire. But to be content and hearty, them are the ways to make Nutfield and life cheerier. I mean to try ’em, miss, I do, if so be you’ll be good enough to lend me a hand.” Withal there was a foolish importance and a simpering affectation about Miss Kingscote which bore out Mrs. Siddons’s verdict on the country lady’s understanding. But no doubt she was good-natured, only her good-nature took, at first, a vexatious form. Lady Bell was labouring to preserve her incognito, to shape her own bearing and tones to the calling which she had adopted. But what was she to do when Miss Kingscote began by loading her hired companion with all the honour and attention which she could pay Lady Bell, and by insisting on waiting upon Lady Bell instead of consenting to be waited upon by her? This unexpected and dangerous intuition of Miss Kingscote’s, thoroughly disconcerted Lady Bell, and might have brought the deceiver to the brink of detection, had not the sense of awe with which she had inadvertently impressed her employer speedily worn off the smooth plane. Miss Kingscote quickly drifted back, to Lady Bell’s relief, into her normal condition of an easy-going, communicative simpleton. Within an hour, Lady Bell heard that the Kingscotes had been no small drink in England a mort of years before, as early as King Arthur’s time or thereabouts—when they would have thought neither Clifford nor Talbot of their brewst. What a proper young man Master Charles was, and how all the girls were pulling caps for him. How well Miss Kingscote had looked when she walked into Lumley at Assize time, in her pea-green tabinet petticoat and cherry-coloured gown. There were no shady hollows, not to say dark gulfs, in Miss Kingscote’s nature and history, notwithstanding that the latter had not been without its romantic reverses. Lady Bell was bidden inspect them from end to end, the very first day. She was made the recipient in full of the narrative of Uncle Mat’s worst iniquities. She heard how the Kingscotes had been reduced within Miss Kingscote’s recollection to the plainest of clothing and coarsest of fare. “And I was not dead beat, or as heavy as a Dutchwoman in those days neither, miss,” laughed Miss Kingscote with her horse laugh. “Lud! no, it is the man or woman as is the jewel. I was called a spirity strapping lass by them as saw me then, and never knew I was a lady.”