After this everything went very smoothly. Mr. Grunderson expanded under the influence of bottled stout and Madeira, and was very loquacious; but sinking presently into a rather stertorous slumber, which he called forty winks, and which generally lasted about an hour and a half, the _ci-devant_ market-gardener left Rosa and Roderick to their own resources. On this Mr. Lowther would have departed, but the candid Rosa begged him to remain. She had kept up a visiting acquaintance with most of her old school-fellows, and as she was perpetually making new acquaintances, she was positively besieged by callers, and had a tea-drinking institution, which she called a kettle-drum, almost every afternoon. The idea of exhibiting the elegant diplomatist to her feminine circle was eminently delightful to Miss Grunderson; and as soon as her papa had begun to snore with undisguised vehemence, she conducted Roderick to the drawing-room, where there were as many albums, and perfume-caskets, and ormolu workboxes, and enamelled book-slides, and _solitaire_ boards, as would have stocked one of Messrs. Parkins and Gotto’s show-rooms, and where a grand piano, scattered with all the easiest polkas in the gaudiest covers, testified to Rosa’s taste for music. Miss Grunderson’s kettle-drum visitors began to assemble almost immediately; and before long Rosa’s drawing-room was full of young ladies in overpowering bonnets and transparent cloaks of every imaginable tissue. The male element was very much in the minority at Miss Grunderson’s gatherings, and was chiefly represented by speechless younger brothers, who came in sulky submission to overbearing sisters, and who lounged in uncomfortable attitudes upon Rosa’s most fragile chairs, spilt their tea upon the velvet table-covers, rarely moved without knocking something down, and left dingy thumb-marks in all Rosa’s albums. Amongst such as these Roderick shone like a star of the first magnitude, and Miss Grunderson exhibited him with unspeakable pride. The kettle-drum lasted for two mortal hours, and Mr. Lowther was one of the last to depart, bored to death, as he told his brother afterwards. “But a fellow must bring his mind to go through a good deal if he wants to marry a millionaire’s only daughter in these hard times,” thought the _attaché_, despondently, as he went yawning to bed. “If my lovely Rosa does become Mrs. Lowther, she will have to renounce her _penchant_ for bad French and violent pink dresses; but she may cram her drawing-room with acquaintance of _quasi_-gentility, and drink tea all day, so far as I shall be concerned in the matter.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXIX. TOO LATE.