'Yes, aunt,' replied Emily, with a slight shade of annoyance on her naturally sweet face. 'Was it not she who behaved so shockingly to Colonel Graves, of the Artillery?' 'It was Graves--the utter cad--who behaved shockingly to her, poor girl,' exclaimed Jerry, with warmth. 'Really, Jerry, you must keep your temper. See how you have made Emily blush.' 'Mother!' 'You are quite pugnacious in defence of this young woman; but please now let us drop the subject.' 'My dear mother,' said Jerry, good-humouredly, and kissing her cheek, as he had now gained his point, 'the male public generally, and particularly that portion of it who wear the red rag, are rather subject to the blandishments of the fair sex, and are not all able to resist them, like St. Anthony the Abbot in his wood at Coma.' 'You make a jest of everything, Jerry,' said Lady Julia; 'but,' she added, under cover of Emily's musical performance, 'it has been said that no one knows how people pick up "a knowledge of others' antecedents from their own careless talk;" thus, my dear boy, I am glad you did not become entangled by that dreadful Trelawney woman.' Jerry, the rogue, thought so now himself, but he coloured deeply at this abrupt remark, as it showed him that his mother knew much more of his movements than he in the least suspected. His pretty cousin Emily, the orphan daughter of his father's younger brother, evidently had a _penchant_ for him; her jealousy of any rival was easily excited; and thus she shared to the full all his mother's overstrained prejudices against Bella Chevenix, and, finding that he was still somewhat indifferent to her charms, she might doubtless have had no objection to get up a little affair with Bevil Goring. But the latter was too preoccupied to relish her vivacity or respond to it, and, though companionable enough, she found him full of his own thoughts, and at times indifferent to a provoking degree. When the ladies retired for the night, and Jerry joined Goring in the smoking-room to have a last whiff, with some seltzer and brandy, he found the latter deep in studying the geography of the Mediterranean, a map of which he had pulled out from a stand of maps on rollers. 'What is up, old fellow?' said Jerry; 'going in for cramming again? Thought you were surely done with that beastly work.' 'Thank heaven, yes; but look here!' Goring had first seen the papers that had come by the evening post, and been cut and laid out by the butler. He had, as usual, turned to the shipping and fashionable intelligence, and to all the paragraphed news, in search of tidings of the lost one, and had alighted at last on an announcement in the _Times_ that Lord Cadbury's yacht, the _Firefly_, 'with Sir Ranald Cheyne and a small but select party on board,' had sailed for the Mediterranean.