Harcourt Lowther and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s darling Julia were not slow to arrive at a very friendly understanding. One morning spent in Miss Desmond’s society was quite sufficient to show so subtle an observer as Harcourt the real state of that young lady’s feelings with regard to her patroness. Indeed, Julia did not take much trouble to conceal her sentiments. Gay and animated one minute, darkly brooding the next, very often captious and contradictory, sharply ironical, or sternly defiant, she was in all things the very reverse of the paid companion who sets her employer’s caprices against the amount of her salary, and gratefully accepts any pleasures or advantages that fall in her way. Maude’s natural forbearance was exaggerated by a remorseful consciousness that all the luxuries and gaieties of her life were so many blessings which she had in a manner stolen from Julia, and her tenderness towards Miss Desmond was unbounded. But there were times when the Irish girl rebelled even against this tenderness. “Do you think my poverty is an open wound, that you approach it so shrinkingly?” she exclaimed impatiently, one day when Maude had broken down in a delicate periphrasis, in which she tried to offer to pay her friend’s milliner’s bill without wounding her friend’s pride. “Why don’t you say at once, ‘My husband has thirty thousand a year, and a twenty-pound note more or less is ineffably unimportant to me--while _you_ must go bareheaded if your pride revolts against dirty tulle and tumbled flowers?’ Pay me my salary, Mrs. Tredethlyn, when it becomes due, and do not force your favours upon me! for I come of a proud race, who are slow to perceive the difference between an unwelcome favour and an uncalled-for insult. As for the unmade silk dresses which you have tried so delicately to force upon me, under the pretence that the colours are unbecoming to your complexion, you can parade your wealth and your generosity by presenting them to your maid. I am _voué au noir_ henceforward; and when you are tired of seeing my shabby-genteel black moiré and Limerick lace in some obscure corner of your rooms, you have only to give me a hint, and I will spend the evening in my own apartment.”