speculated amongst themselves upon the extent of Lionel Hillary’s wealth, would have gladly taken Maude to wife, “ex everything.” But Julia Desmond could not understand all this, and she regarded her benefactor’s daughter as a feminine image of the golden calf, before which mercenary mankind bowed down in servile worship. The two girls seated themselves in the little temple, and the two worshippers came round and performed their homage. But Miss Hillary had more to say to her dogs than to the loungers on the lawn. “Good morning, Captain Masters.--Floss, you are the naughtiest darling.--Haven’t I told you once before, Scrub, that Honiton lace is _not_ good to eat?--Papa has not come home yet, I suppose, Mr. Somerset?--That tiresome City makes a kind of orphan of me, doesn’t it, Julia? We never have papa to go with us anywhere now, do we, Julia?--No, Peasblossom, anything but a locket with papa’s hair in it. _That_ must not be worried.--When are we to go to the _fête_, Captain Masters?” The captain shrugged his shoulders. He was very young, and held every thing upon earth, except Maude, in supreme detestation and contempt. “As from four to five is about the hottest period in the entire day, I believe the _fête_ is supposed to be at its best somewhere between four and five,” he said; “we manage these things so remarkably well in England.” “But as the Duke and Duchess are both French, I suppose the management of the _fête_ at the Château de Bourbon is French too, isn’t it?” asked Miss Desmond. Maude was occupied with a Scotch terrier, who was making ferocious snaps at the jasmine trailing from the roof above her. She would have made a charming subject for a modern Greuze, with the dog held up in her hands, and the loose white muslin sleeves falling back from those fair rounded arms in soft cloudy folds. “The Duke and Duchess are very charming,” said Mr. Somerset; “and when one thinks that if they had lived in seventeen ninety-three, instead of eighteen forty-eight, they’d have been inevitably guillotined on the Place Louis Quinze, instead of being comfortably settled in the neighbourhood of Isleworth, one feels an extraordinary kind of interest in them as living illustrations of improvement of the times. But, apart from that, Miss Hillary, don’t you think the _fête_ a bore? Don’t you think any charity _fête_ more or less a bore? I can understand people sending you a subscription list, and telling their man to wait in your hall till you write a cheque for them; but I can’t understand people choosing the hottest day in a hot summer to parade about a garden, grinning and smirking at one another, and giving exorbitant prices for things they don’t want.” “But you mean to go to the _fête_, Mr. Somerset?” “Most decidedly, if I am to have the honour of going with you--and Miss Desmond.” Miss Desmond, with one flash of her black eyes, expressed her appreciation of the little pause that had preceded Mr. Somerset’s mention of her name.