Mrs Chiley gave her young visitor a very cordial kiss when she went away. "The sense she has!" said the old lady; but at the same time the Colonel's wife was so old-fashioned that this contemptuous way of treating "The Gentlemen" puzzled her unprogressive intelligence. She thought it was superhuman virtue on Lucilla's part, nearly incredible, and yet established by proofs so incontestable that it would be a shame to doubt it; and she felt ashamed of herself--she who might have been a grandmother, had such been the will of Providence--for lingering five minutes undecided between her two best caps. "I dare say Lucilla does not spend so much time on such vanity, and she only nineteen," said the penitent old lady. As for Miss Marjoribanks, she returned up Grange Lane with a mind at ease, and that consciousness of superior endowments which gives amiability and expansion even to the countenance. She did not give any money to the beggar who at that period infested Grange Lane with her six children, for that was contrary to those principles of political economy which she had studied with such success at Mount Pleasant; but she stopped and asked her name, and where she lived, and promised to inquire into her case. "If you are honest and want to work, I will try to find you something to do," said Miss Marjoribanks; which, to be sure, was a threat appalling enough to keep her free from any further molestation on the part of that interesting family. But Lucilla, to do her justice, felt it equally natural that beneficence should issue from her in this manner as in that other mode of feeding the hungry which she was willing to adopt at half-past one, and had solemnly engaged herself to fulfil at seven o'clock. She went up after that to Mr Holden's, and had a most interesting conversation, and found among his stores a delicious damask, softly, spiritually green, of which, to his great astonishment, she tried the effect in one of the great mirrors which ornamented the shop. "It is just the tint I want," Lucilla said, when she had applied that unusual test; and she left the fashionable upholsterer of Carlingford in a state of some uncertainty whether it was curtains or dresses that Miss Marjoribanks meant to have made.