“Thursday, if Mr. Stafford doesn’t bring him along all innocent! He, with his handsome lady on his arm, up from Windsor for the day, to buy her a stylish head for a Christmas present. And, ‘What are you doing, looking in at a hat-shop window, Bellairs,’ says he, laughing and joking (’tis his way, my dear, a very agreeable gentleman!) ‘Gad,’ says he, ‘you’ve not got a wife to run you up bills! Your chinkers goes hopping out on hosses and dice and cards, and what not! Selfish fellows you bachelors are!’ And Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, bowing to Mr. Stafford and declaring he only wished he had other people’s luck--and indeed, Miss Smithson, Mrs. Stafford is a real beauty!--but all the while, my dear, who is he looking at and ogling and taking occasion to whisper to--but Miss Pounce, if you please! And if I didn’t see the way her kerchief lace was quivering with the palpitation of her heart, and her hands shaking as she took down heads for Mrs. Stafford and held them up for her--well, my name’s not Popple.” Miss Smithson leant over the sulky coal fire and lifted the saucepan from the hob to refill her glass. Her own hands shook. That Pamela was a disgrace and would bring discredit on the whole house of Mirabel! She felt it in her bones. “You may say so, dear.” As her friend drank, Polly Popple tendered her own tumbler for replenishment, murmuring parenthetically, however: (“Not a drop more, love. I never did hold with stimulants, only you were so pressing and it is a foggy night, I won’t deny, and a drop of cordial, a mere medical precaution, so to speak)--you may say so,” the slighted young lady of the bonnet department took up her theme with fresh gusto. “And you’d say so a million times more if you had seen them to-day. For Mr. Jocelyn comes in with my Lady Kilcroney--and oh! the bold brazenness of it!--there he stands behind my Lady’s chair and Pounce--La! I declare I’d have been sorry for her if she wasn’t what she is, the baggage--red and white and not knowing where to put her eyes with him signalling to her. Yes, and if he did not thrust a letter into her hand as I went out, you may set me down a liar. And her stuffing it into her kerchief under my very nose!” “Don’t, dear, don’t,” moaned Miss Smithson, beating the air with her bony hand. Then, after a long pause, during which she seemed to be painfully bringing her virginal mind to confront the awful pictures just presented to it, she went on acridly: “There’ll be a bust up. When a girl comes to that _pint_ of disreputableness things is bound to happen. It can’t go on like this--you mark my words.” Now, strangely enough, barring the inexactitude of the premise, such a conclusion had just formed itself in Pamela’s own mind.