This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus: “For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage, Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three hundred pounds. “So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.” He wrote the address on a tablet in his _portemonnaie_, and went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St. James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste--or rather hansom-cab haste--to the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXII. HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS. The party in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s opera-box that evening was a very pleasant one. Whatever business had taken Harcourt Lowther to Richmond must have been tolerably satisfactory in its result, for that gentleman’s spirits were gayer than usual as he stood behind Maude’s chair in the shadow of the crimson curtain, talking to her under cover of all those crashing choruses and grand orchestral effects which Meyerbeer must surely have composed with a view to comfortable conversation. Miss Grunderson was gorgeous in thirty guineas worth of blue moiré antique _à la Watteau_, and exhibited a small fortune in the way of lace and artificial flowers upon her plump little person. Her diamond earrings were the biggest in the opera-house; though it must be confessed that a straw-coloured tint, which the connoisseur repudiates, pervaded the gems that the market-gardener had bought for his daughter--size, rather than purity of water, being the quality for which Mr. Grunderson selected his diamonds. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between Maude’s simple toilet of white silk and Rosa’s gaudy splendour.