"It would please them very much if you would go," Miss Esperance said persuasively; "we shouldn’t stay more than an hour." Mr. Wycherly wrinkled up his forehead in the greatest perplexity: "But I never go anywhere," he said again. "And why not?" Miss Esperance asked boldly. "If it were almost anybody else, I would not press you, but they are so sensitive. If you don’t go they will think it is because you are proud, and don’t think them good enough." "Me! Proud!" ejaculated poor Mr. Wycherly. "But this is dreadful." "They stopped us one day," remarked the pen-sucking Montagu, "and asked if you were not very stand-off, and Edmund said it was bosh, and you were nothing of the sort, and that if they just came and played handy-pandy with you, they’d soon see." "Well," said Miss Esperance, tapping the letter, "what am I to say?" "O, say Guardie’s much obliged and he’ll be very pleased to come, and that we’ll be very pleased to come, too," suggested Montagu, who appreciated tea at the Misses Moffat’s. "I did not ask you, Montagu," Miss Esperance remarked with dignity. "Well, dear friend, may I say you will go with me?" "Do you _wish_ me to go, Miss Esperance?" groaned Mr. Wycherly. "I don’t wish you to do anything intensely disagreeable to yourself, but, if you did go, it would assuredly give great pleasure to them—and to me——" "Then I will go," said Mr. Wycherly; and he said it with all the resolution of a man determined to do or die. The Misses Moffat were greatly flustered, for Mr. and Mrs. Dewar were also to be of the party, and to entertain two gentlemen at once was an unheard-of plunge into the wildest dissipation. They paid innumerable visits of inspection to their little dining-room, where the tea-table, laid early in the afternoon, positively groaned under its load of dainties. No less than four different kinds of jam gleamed jewel-like, each in a cut-glass dish, at the four corners of the table: while cookies, soda scones, dropped scones, short bread, and the cream cakes, so appreciated by Montagu, were piled up in abundance on the various plates. In the centre of the table was a large _épergne_ arranged with flowers by Miss Jeanie’s artistic hands. These preparations all completed, there yet remained the arrangement of the guests at table. "You see, me dear," said Miss Maggie, anxiously, "we must ask Mr. Dewar to take the foot of the table because he’s the minister, and will ask the blessing. But the question is, where’ll we put Mr. Wycherly? Because, you see, whoever sits by Mr. Wycherly will get a gentleman on either side, which doesn’t seem quite fair somehow. If we put him on my right hand and give him Mrs. Dewar for a partner, then she’ll be seated next her husband, and that doesn’t seem quite correct; and yet, if we put Miss Esperance Bethune there, that’s not right, either, and her seeing him every day."