For the time being that dressing-glass seemed to be a framed picture in which could be seen the sweet face of a beautiful woman, whose blue eyes were pensive and full of trouble. It was the picture of one greatly in deshabille; but then it was the lady's dressing-room, and there was no one present but the maid. The chamber was charmingly furnished, enough showing in the glass to make an effective background to the picture; and to add to the charm there was a delicious odour of blended scents that seemed to be exhaled by the principal flower in the room--she whose picture shone in the muslin-draped frame. There is nothing very new, it may be presumed, for a handsome woman to be seated before her glass with her long hair down, gazing straight before her into the reflector; but this was an exceptional case, for Maude Diphoos was looking right into her mirror and could not see herself. Sometimes what she saw was Charley Melton, but at the present moment the face of Dolly Preen, her maid, as that body stood half behind her chair, brushing away at her mistress' long tresses, which crackled and sparkled electrically, and dropping upon them certain moist pearls which she as rapidly brushed away. Dolly Preen was a pretty, plump, dark girl, with a certain rustic beauty of her own such as was found sometimes in the sunny village by the Hurst, from which she had been taken to become young ladies' maid, a sort of moral pincushion, into which Mademoiselle Justine Framboise, her ladyship's attendant, stuck venomed verbal pins. But Dolly did not look pretty in the glass just now, for her nose was very red, her eyes were swollen up, and as she sniffed, and choked, and uttered a low sob from time to time, she had more the air of a severely punished school-girl than a prim young ladies' maid in an aristocratic family. Dolly wept and dropped tears on the beautiful soft tangled hair at which Sir Grantley Wilters had often cast longing glances. Then she brushed them off again, and took out her handkerchief to blow her nose--a nose which took a great deal of blowing, as it was becoming overcharged with tears. "Oh, Dolly, Dolly," said her mistress at last, "this is very, very sad." At this moment through the open window, faintly heard, there floated, softened by distance, that delicious, now forgotten, but once popular strain--"I'm a young man from the country, but you don't get over me." Dorothy Preen, Sussex yeoman's daughter, was a young woman from the country, and was it because the air seemed _apropos_ that the maiden suddenly uttered an ejaculation which sounded like _Ow_! and dropping the ivory-backed brush, plumped herself down upon the carpet, as if making a nursery cheese, and began to sob as if her heart would break? Was it the appropriate nature of the air? No; it was the air producer.