“I don’t care much for them,” he answered, frankly. “I never had any but once, and that was in Van Diemen’s Land, when I had the fever,--fifteen of them on my temples, and that was no joke, you know, Miss Desmond.” He was quite at his ease with Julia; but he would not for the world have been so confidential to Maude Hillary. Miss Desmond laughed good-naturedly. “I don’t mean those horrible creatures that they put on one’s temples,” she exclaimed, “but Mr. John Leech, the caricaturist. You must have seen _Punch_, even in Van Diemen’s Land?” “Oh, yes! my mas--superior officer used to get it from his mother every mail.” He took the portfolio from Miss Desmond, and turned over the leaves: but he only stared absently at Mr. Leech’s most brilliant performances, and his eyes wandered away every now and then to the piano, where Maude Hillary was skimming through the gems of a new opera and dallying with her two adorers, deliciously unconscious of their adoration. Had she not inhabited an atmosphere of universal admiration and affection ever since she had exhibited her pink cheeks and infantile ringlets in company with the seven-shilling March peaches and five-guinea pine-apples, after her father’s pompous dinners, to be admired by ponderous old City magnates in the pauses of solemn discussions upon the rate of discount and the last grand crash on the Stock Exchange? Julia Desmond, always observant--cursed, perhaps, with an especial faculty for penetrating all unpleasant secrets lying hidden under the many masks which society has invented for the convenience of mankind--Miss Desmond, I say, was not slow to perceive the Cornishman’s preoccupation, nor slow to credit Miss Hillary with another item in that heavy account so long standing between them.