"Indeed! I have heard that Devonshire is quite too lovely," said the matron, who would have despised herself had she been familiar with her native land. "But what have you done with Mr. Hamleigh? I am quite disappointed at not seeing him this afternoon." "He is in Scotland," said Christabel, and then went on to tell as much as was necessary about her lover's journey to the North. "How dreadfully dull you must be without him!" said the lady, sympathetically, and several other ladies--notably a baronet's widow, who had been a friend of Mrs. Tregonell's girlhood--a woman who never said a kind word of anybody, yet was invited everywhere, and who had the reputation of giving a better dinner, on a small scale, than any other lonely woman in London. The rest were young women, mostly of the gushing type, who were prepared to worship Christabel because she was pretty, an heiress, and engaged to a man of some distinction in their particular world. They had all clustered round Mrs. Tregonell and her niece, in the airy front drawing-room, while Miss Bridgeman poured out tea at a Japanese table in the middle room, waited upon sedulously by Major Bree, Mr. FitzPelham, and another youth, a Somerset House young man, who wrote for the Society papers--or believed that he did, on the strength of having had an essay on "Tame Cats" accepted in the big gooseberry season--and gave himself to the world as a person familiar with the undercurrents of literary and dramatic life. The ladies made a circle round Mrs. Tregonell, and these three gentlemen, circulating with tea-cups, sugar-basins, and cream-pots, joined spasmodically in the conversation. Christabel owned to finding a certain emptiness in life without her lover. She did not parade her devotion to him, but was much too unaffected to pretend indifference. "We went to the theatre on Tuesday night," she said. "Oh, how could you!" cried the oldest and most gushing of the three young ladies. "Without Mr. Hamleigh?" "That was our chief reason for going. We knew we should be dull without him. We went to the Kaleidoscope, and were delighted with Psyche." All three young ladies gushed in chorus. Stella Mayne was quite too lovely--a poem, a revelation, and so on, and so on. Lady Cumberbridge, the baronet's widow, pursed her lips and elevated her eyebrows, which, on a somewhat modified form, resembled Lord Thurlow's, but said nothing. The Somerset House young man stole a glance at FitzPelham, and smiled meaningly; but the amiable FitzPelham was only vacuous. "Of course you have seen this play," said Mrs. Tregonell, turning to Lady Cumberbridge. "You see everything, I know?"