"Your niece?" says Madam O'Connor, staring hard at Monica's pure little face, the girl looking straight back at her with a certain amount of curiosity in her eyes.--"Well, I wish you no greater fortune than your face, my dear," says the old Irishwoman. "It ought to be a rich one, I'm thinking. You're like your mother, too; but your eyes are honester than hers. You must know I knew Kitty Blake very well at one time." "I have heard my mother speak of you," says Monica. "Ay--so? Yet I fear there wasn't much love lost between us." Then she turns a little aside to greet some one else, and Monica lets her eyes roam round the grounds. Suddenly she starts, and says out loud,-- "Ah! there is Olga?" "You know Mrs. Bohun, then?" says her hostess, attracted by her exclamation and her pretty vivacious expression. "So very, very well," says Monica. She has flushed warmly, and her eyes are brilliant. "I want to speak to her; I want to go to her, _please_." "Bless me! what a shame to waste that lovely blush on a mere woman!" says Madam O'Connor, with a merry laugh. "Here, Fred," turning to a young man standing close to her with a very discontented expression, "I am going to give you a mission after your own heart. You are to take Miss Beresford over there, to where Mrs. Bohun is dealing death to all those boys.--This is Lord Rossmoyne, Miss Beresford: he will see you safely over your rubicon." "Oh, thank you!" says Monica, gratefully smiling at her. "Tut, child! thank me when I have done something for you. It is Fred's turn to thank me now," says Madam O'Connor, with a merry twinkle in her gray eyes. She is a large woman close on sixty, with an eagle eye and a hawk's nose. As Monica leaves her she continues her gossip with the half dozen young men round her, who are all laughing at some joke. Presently she herself is laughing louder than any of them (being partial to boys and their "fun," as she calls it). Bestowing now a smart blow with her fan upon the youngest and probably therefore most flippant of her attendants, she stalks away from them across the lawn, to where two ladies are sitting together. One is elderly, but most ridiculously dressed in juvenile attire, that might have well suited the daughter sitting beside her. This latter is a tall girl, and large in every way, with curious eyes and a rather harsh voice; she is laughing now at some remark made by a man lounging at the back of her chair, and the laugh is both affected and discordant. "Have you seen that girl of Kitty Beresford's, Edith?" asks Madam O'Connor of the elder lady. "That little washed-out-looking girl who came with those two old Miss Blakes?" asks the youthful old woman, with a profoundly juvenile lisp. "Faith, I don't know about her being washed out," says Madam O'Connor, bluntly. "I think she is the prettiest creature I've seen this many a day." "You are so impulsive, my dear Theresa!" says her friend, with a simper: "all your geese are swans."