"You are ever gracious and obliging. Good-night." "Good-morning, for it has just chimed four." They saluted each other with stateliest courtesy, and Lavendale left, but not to go straight back to Bloomsbury. Late as it was, he felt there was still a chance of company and play at White's chocolate-house; so it was westward to St. James's Street he betook himself, there to lose a few of those loose guineas which he always had in his pocket, albeit he was practically a pauper. CHAPTER X. "AND SUDDENLY, SWEETLY, MY HEART BEAT STRONGER." Squire Bosworth, having once consented to bring his daughter to town, was not a man to stint money in detail. He surprised his sister-in-law by the liberality of his arrangements and the liberty he allowed her in expenditure. She had excellent rooms for herself and her gaunt daughters, and a coach and four at her disposition, with free license to buy tickets for concerts, operas, masquerades, and public amusements of all kinds; and she was told to order all that was needful for the adornment of the heiress's person. Her ladyship was an old campaigner, and knew how to profit by her position. The mantua-makers and milliners who waited upon Mrs. Bosworth were tradeswomen who had supplied Lady Tredgold for a quarter of a century, and she had them, as it were, under her thumb. "I have so little money to spend, my dears, that if I did not spend it with the same people year after year, I should not be of the slightest importance to fashionable trades-folk. But by a steady patronage of the same people, and by always paying ready money, I have contrived to keep the best milliner and mantua-maker in London my very humble and devoted servants." It happened, therefore, that in these halcyon days of the Arlington Street lodgings, Mrs. Amelia and Mrs. Sophia Tredgold were supplied with gowns and caps almost at half-price by these obliging and confidential purveyors. There was a handsome margin for profit upon the prices paid for Irene's Court-train and other fineries. Everything in that wonderful world of fashion and pleasure was new and surprising to the girl who had been reared in the seclusion of Fairmile Park. She gave herself up freely to the enchantments of the dazzling, dissipated, extravagant, artificial town. She saw only the glitter and sparkle of society's surface, and knew not that the light was the phosphorescence of putrefaction; that the whole fabric, this fairy palace gleaming with lights and breathing music, was rotten to the core, and might fall about the heads of these revellers at any moment, as that other fairy palace where Philip the Regent and his _roués_ had so lately held their orgies was doomed to fall before the century should be ended.