Lady Bell was resting and anticipating, with lips apart and a flickering smile, what hero of her train would turn up soonest. Miss Sundon was pensively helping Miss Lyddy Sundon to the last macaroon, on which the hobble-de-hoy squire had cast a covetous eye, and remarking with a sigh, “Sister, we need not have been so hurried as to take away the little appetites we have, scarcely a soul is to be seen. I understand it is the correct thing not to come till near ten o’clock. But you and I must do as we are bidden.” “And a good thing for you too, girls,” proclaimed Lady Sundon, in her slightly view-halloo voice. “What! wait till near ten and miss all the company coming, the best part of the pleasure, and the half of the concert—though I can’t say I care for their Italian squalling; give me one of Lady Bell’s lessons on the spinet, or a good English chorus. But my likings are neither here nor there. And no, say I, I shan’t be cheated of half my treat, such as it is. There is somebody I ought to know. Heyday! it is my own cousin, Harry Fane, come up from his ship at Portsmouth.” Lady Sundon whisked off her seat, unimpeded by her size or her years, as if she had been a girl of sixteen, and favoured by the thinness of the company, succeeded in overtaking and tapping with her fan the shoulder of a gentleman in blue and white uniform, whom she arrested in his course, and brought back with her, as a reward of virtue and early habits. “See what I’ve got by coming betimes, girls; sure, we might never have set eyes on each other if the rooms had been full,” Lady Sundon cried exultingly, and then she rattled on in one long sentence, with breaks for breath. “You know my step-daughters, Harry, and this is Lady Bell Trevor, a friend of Mrs. Sundon, of Chevely (at least, she used to be of Chevely, poor soul! before Greg Sundon went all to the dogs), who does us the honour of being with us this winter. All agog Lady Bell keeps us, I can tell you, so that neither she, nor we, can get peace for you men.” “Pray don’t give me so bad a character, madam,” objected Lady Bell demurely. “It has been the same tune,” maintained Lady Sundon, “since she was Lady Bell Etheredge, Earl Etheredge’s daughter (I hope you are up in your peerage, Harry); she had to marry old Squire Trevor, for peace, when she was a chit of fifteen, but he is dead, and she is as bad as ever.” “Do you mean to fright your cousin, till he refuse to be presented to me, Lady Sundon?” Lady Bell cut short the tale of her conquests. “He ain’t such a lubberly coward as to deprive himself of what blue jackets, as well as red coats, are fighting for; if he were, he should get no harbour from me. Lady Bell Trevor, Captain Fane of the _Thunderbomb_. He may pull a long face at our frivolity, and pretend to find fault with us for being children playing with toys, but he is not such a bad fellow at bottom—as some of these misanthropes—misogynists, what-d’ye call-‘ems.”