"O, it is only to make us all sick with envy at the splendour of her sables. His lordship bought them for her in Paris. They are worth a king's ransom. 'Tis said he allows her a hundred guineas a month, but I am sure she must spend three times as much." "You make me feel as if I were one of the Seven Sleepers," exclaimed Lavendale. "Is not Mrs. Robinson the very pink and pattern of virtue; so chaste and cold a being that even the too tender wooing of Senesino in an opera--mere stage love-making--wounded and offended her?" "That is perfectly true; but it is no less true that she smiles upon Lord Peterborough. Who could withstand a warrior and a hero? The man who conquered a province with a mere handful of troops must needs be irresistible to a weak woman. She is living at Parson's Green with her mother; but as Peterborough spends most of his life there, people will talk." "In spite of the mother?" "In spite of the mother," echoed Judith. "However, it is hinted they are privately married, and there are those among us who still continue to receive Mrs. Robinson under that charitable supposition; ourselves, for instance. Topsparkle is such a fanatic about music that I hardly dare question a soprano's reputation, or hint that a tenor has the air of having sprung from the gutter. At Ringwood Abbey we receive every one who can sing or play to perfection, without reference to character. I myself own to a prejudice in favour of those ladies who are still at their first or second lover, in preference to those who have ruined half the pretty fellows in town. But Bononcini and Handel are the two people who really choose our society. We have our Bononcini set and our Handel set, and are Italian or German as those great masters dictate. But you must come to Ringwood some day and judge for yourself. How do you like my husband?" This was asked abruptly, with the lightest, most impertinent air. "Mr. Topsparkle's courtesy to me just now renders me too much his debtor to be disinterested. I am already a partial critic. But I am told by the indifferent world that he is a most accomplished gentleman." "Yes, he is very clever. But it is a fantastical kind of cleverness. He plays the organ divinely, knows ever so many modern languages, and writes French almost as well as Monsieur le Voltaire. He has un-Englished himself by his long residence on the Continent, and must be judged by a foreign standard of taste." "So long as he has succeeded in making you happy--" began Lavendale, in a lowered voice. "Do I not look happy?" she asked, with smiling lips under the little velvet mask. "You look gloriously handsome. That radiant surface is too dazzling for me to penetrate deeper. Who could question those lovely lips when they smile, or dare hint that silvery laughter might be artificial? I will believe anything those lips tell me."