"Hinges! ha! ha! ha! Very good, Dick. Likely story that. I see you're the same as ever. Travellers' tales. But we are not so easily taken in, are we, Hester?" Mrs. Gresley certainly had the gift of prophecy as far as the Pratts were concerned. Mrs. Pratt duly took the expected "fancy" to Rachel, and pressed her to stay at "The Towers" while she was in the neighborhood, and make further acquaintance with her "young ladies." "Ada is very pernickety," she said, smiling towards that individual conversing with Dick. "She won't make friends with everybody, and she gives it me" (with maternal pride) "when I ask people to stay whom she does not take to. She says there's a very poor lot round here, and most of the young ladies so ill-bred and empty she does not care to make friends with them. I don't know where she gets all her knowledge from. I'm sure it's not from her mother. Ada, now you come and talk a little to Miss West." Ada rose with the air of one who confers a favor, and Rachel made room for her on the sofa, while Mrs. Pratt squeezed herself behind the tea-table with Mrs. Gresley. The conversation turned on bicycling. "I bike now and then in the country," said Ada, "but I have not done much lately. We have only just come down from town, and, _of course_, I never bike in London." Rachel had just said that she did. "Perhaps you are nervous about the traffic," said Rachel. "Oh! I'm not the least afraid of the traffic, but it's such bad form to bike in London." "That, of course, depends on how it's done," said Rachel; "but I am sure in your ease you need not be afraid." Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer. When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother: "Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she's just as stuck up as she can be." The Pratts were "Liverpool." "Well, my dear," said Mrs. Pratt with natural pride, "it's well known no one is good enough for you. But I took to Miss West, and an orphan and all, with all that money, poor thing!" "She has no style," said Selina, "but she has a nice face; and she's coming to stay with Sibbie Loftus next week, when she leaves Vi Newhaven. She may be Birmingham, Ada, but she's just as thick with county people as we are." "I did not rightly make out," said Mrs. Pratt, reflectively, "whether that tall gentleman, Mr. Vernon, was after Miss West or Hessie Gresley." "Oh, ma! You always think some one's after somebody else," said Ada, impatiently, whose high breeding obliged her to be rather peremptory with her simple parent. "Mr. Vernon is a pauper, and so is Hessie. And, besides, Hessie is not the kind of girl anybody would want to marry." "Well, I'm not so sure of that," said Selina. "But if she had had any chances I know she would have told me, because I told her all about Captain Cobbett and Mr. Baxter." CHAPTER XVIII