"I have just been thinking, Miss Craven, how pleasant your first impressions of us must be. What a well-mannered, courteous family you must think us!--I tumbling out of the window at the risk of breaking my neck to avoid you, and my father and mother going to dinner without you." "If you had been a little quicker in your movements, I should have known nothing about you," responds she, the carmine called forth by her detection dying slowly out of her cheeks, and noticing only the half of his sentence that refers to himself. "Ah! I am not so young as I was" (with a sigh); "but, to tell the truth, we had just been dragging the pool, like Boodles in 'Happy Thoughts,' and I was such a mass of mud that I had not moral courage to face you." "We should have met on equal terms. I was as black as a coal, was not I?" "Railroads do make one wonderfully dusty," replies Miss Blessington, with a polite, evasive platitude. "I had a worse infliction than any dust to bear," says Esther, stretching her long throat around the bigonia to get a fuller view of her _vis-à-vis_. "A baby, of course?" replies he, stretching his neck too for a like purpose. "An aggravated case of baby--a baby that had something odd the matter with it." "Not so bad as a man drinking sherry," says he, his grey eyes and a bit of his nose laughing through the leaves; "a woman eating gingerbread is bad enough. I travelled once with a woman who ate gingerbread from London to Holyhead without stopping." "And did not offer you any?" "Good heavens, no! What a prodigious suggestion!--that would have been adding insult to injury." "If I had been travelling with you I should undoubtedly have offered you some. I should have judged you by myself, and I am very fond of gingerbread." "Indeed!" "And" (with a mischievous look) "fonder still of peppermint lozenges, particularly in church on hot Sunday afternoons." They were getting quite voluble, chatting and chirping like a nest of magpies--like children playing and laughing in a garden, unmindful that in a cave in a corner is a great old bear who may pounce out on them at any moment. The Felton bear pounces. "What the devil do you mean leaving that door open? Morris! John! George! Here, some of you! there's a door open somewhere between here and the kitchen. Don't contradict me, sir! I say there is; if I catch you propping those swing doors open," &c. &c. * * * * *