"Not I, my darling; never berrer.--Off at last, are you?" this last observation addressed to the conquered boot. "But you, what's marrer with you? Look all flushed and frightened like." "I've had a horrid confused dream about the theatre, and people we saw there, and snakes, oh so dreadful! and that grave man, Colonel Somebody, that you introduced me to, was just going to rescue me. Oh, Charley, I feel so low and depressed, and as though something were going to happen. I'm sure we shan't be happy in London. Let's go away again. "Nonsense, Georgie;--nonsense, my love! Very jolly place for--good supper,--Colonel Snakes;" and with these intelligible murmurings Sir Charles Mitford slipped into the land of dreams. CHAPTER V GEORGIE. If, twelve months before the production of Mr. Spofforth's play (which necessarily forms a kind of Hegira in this story), you had told Georgie Stanfield that she was destined to be the wife of a baronet, the mistress of a house in one of the best parts of London, the possessor of horses and carriages, and all the happiness which a very large yearly income can command, your assertions would have been met, not with ridicule--for Georgie was too gentle and too well-bred for that--but with utter disbelief. Her whole life had been passed in the little Devonshire village of which her father was vicar, and it seemed to her impossible that she could ever live anywhere else. To potter about in the garden during the summer in a large flapping straw hat and a cotton gown, to tie up drooping flowers and snip off dead leaves; to stand on the little terrace dreamily gazing over the outspread sea, watching the red sails of the fishing-smacks skimming away to the horizon, or the trim yachts lying off the little port--the yachts whose fine-lady passengers, and gallant swells all blue broad-cloth and club-button, seen at a distance,--were Georgie's sole links with the fashionable world; to visit and read to the bed-ridden old women and the snuffling, coughing old men; to superintend the preparation of charitably-dispensed gruel and soup; to traverse Mavor's Spelling-book up and down, up and down, over and over again, in the company of the stupid girls of the village-school; to read the _Cullompton Chronicle_ to her father on Thursdays, and to copy out his sermon on the Saturday evenings,--these had been the occupations of Georgie Stanfield's uneventful life.