As Mr Cavendish was thus making his way home, horribly vexed and annoyed with himself, and avoiding Grange Lane as if the plague was in it, Miss Marjoribanks sat in her drawing-room alone, and thought the matter over. Certainly she had not expected him that evening, but still, when she heard ten o'clock strike, and felt that his coming now absolutely impossible, she was a little--not exactly disappointed, but annoyed at herself for having felt a sort of expectation. Lucilla was not a person to hide her sentiments, or even to conceal a fact which was disagreeable to her _amour propre_. She had too thorough and well-founded a confidence in the natural interest of the world in all belonging to her to do that; so when ten o'clock had done striking, she opened her blotting-book and took one of her pretty sheets of paper, with Lucilla on it in delicate rose-tinted letters, the L very large, and the concluding letters very small, and dashed off her note to Mrs Chiley. The Miss Blounts' at Mount Pleasant had been one of the very first establishments to forsake the handwriting which was all corners, in favour of the bold running hand of the present female generation; and it was accordingly in a very free and strongly-characterised manuscript, black with much ink, that Miss Marjoribanks wrote: "DEAREST MRS CHILEY,--I never expected him to come, and he has not. I dare say he never meant it. I am so glad. It was Providence that sent you at that particular moment to-day.--Always in haste, with fond love, your most truly affectionate "LUCILLA."