Cissy was at the pianoforte. If Mr. Sawyer had thought her charming before, what must have been his opinion of that sparkling young lady now, seen through the medium of a fair share of champagne at dinner, and the best part of two bottles of claret afterwards? Lights, dress, and a general atmosphere of luxury and refinement, have a wonderful effect in enhancing the attractions of the fair. Alas, that we should have lived to admit it! Though the poet may opine that “beauty unadorned is adorned the most,” our hackneyed taste cannot but confess that it prefers the French maid’s _coiffure_ to the dishevelled tresses; the trim silk stocking, and neat satin shoe, to the slippers down at heel; and the shapely _corsage_, with its abundant _crinoline_, to the limp and unassuming dressing-gown. Mr. Sawyer was quite satisfied with Cissy as she was. The musician was playing “The Swallows,” or “The Humming Bird,” or “The Spring Geese;” Sawyer had no ear for music, and neither knew nor cared which. She just glanced at him as he entered the room, but the encouragement was sufficient to lead him to the instrument. “How _long_ you have been!” said Miss Cissy in a low voice, without looking up, rattling away at the keys in the loudest of _finales_, with a vehemence that drowned her observations to all ears but her admirer’s. Then she closed the instrument, whispered papa to order the whist-table, and went and sat on the sofa by Mrs. Merrywether in such a position that Mr. Sawyer couldn’t possibly get at her. They do not read Izaak Walton, these young women, and yet how well they know how to play their fish! Is it constant reflection and mutual discussion, I wonder, that makes the least experienced of them such skilful anglers? or is it not rather an intuitive sagacity, akin to that with which the kitten teases her ball of cotton as dexterously as the cat does a full-grown mouse? They suck it in, the science of man-taming, I am inclined to believe, with their mothers’ milk. Mamma was just the same, doubtless; and grandmamma too, whom she can just remember, with a cough and crutches, and so on, up to Eve. With the good-humoured Struggles for a partner and so much of his brains as the claret had left untouched, filled with the image of a dark-eyed young person in white muslin, it was Mr. Sawyer’s lot to do battle at the noble game of whist, against two no less formidable antagonists than Savage and Parson Dove, both first-rate performers even after dinner.