It was the acknowledgment that he couldn’t pay her back that softened Miss Pounce’s obduracy towards him. She consented to forgive him, to consider him as a friend, even to admit the possibility that if they met--oh, quite accidentally!--on an off-day, she mightn’t refuse to take a stroll with him in the Green Park. It would seem as if nothing had changed; as if she was the same too-trusting, foolish girl, and he the same sly, audacious villain; yet, as she determinedly parted from him and hurried out of the garden to her lodging, she knew that there had come a profound alteration into their relations. Meanwhile the enmity excited in the bosoms of Miss Smithson and Miss Popple against the successful milliner was far from abating. Indeed, the mature young lady who had hoped for Pamela Pounce’s present position had an ever-gathering sense of grievance. What if she had a heavy hand? Were there not solid dowagers and others who preferred substance and money’s worth to your fly-away gossamer nothings? Between these two important members of Madame Mirabel’s establishment, there had come to be a tacit understanding--though they were far too genteel and high-minded to indulge in anything like a conspiracy--that it was their bounden duty, in dear Madame Mirabel’s interests, to keep a sharp look-out on Miss Pounce, and report any proceeding of hers calculated to injure them. “As, of course, my dear, poor Anna-Maria,” Clara Smithson would declare of her rich business relative, “is that good-natured that times and times I’ve had to step in, as it were, and save her from herself.” Miss Popple was too tactful to request specification. “La, you never say, dear!” she would exclaim, with unflagging emphasis. “And what a good thing it is that she’s got you, the poor kind creature! ’Tis what we all feel.” The while her private thoughts would run contemptuously: “As if every one didn’t know, you long-toothed old frump, that ’tis you Madame keeps on out of charity, and has the books regular checked by a spry young gentleman from the bank every Saturday night, private, or they’d be in the muddle of the world before the month was out!” Miss Clara Smithson’s secret opinion of Miss Popple was probably no more complimentary, but it is in the nature of things that worthy individuals, working for a common cause, should sink personal feelings; and, therefore, when Miss Smithson made the appalling discovery in connection with the pink-flounced muslin of a Sunday afternoon, it was Miss Popple to whom she confided it the first thing on Monday morning.