When blustering March was over, and the dead season of the year had been for rich, as well as poor, got through, the widow of the lamented Cecil Vavasour commenced--for the first time since his death--making preparations for a three-months’ sojourn in London, or, as the newspapers expressed it, “Lady Millicent Vavasour, her family and suite, were about, during the ensuing season, to occupy the mansion in Bolton-square, to her ladyship belonging.” In the course of the six years that Lady Millicent had passed in a seclusion which she had not attempted to render otherwise than irksome to her daughters, the above-named mansion had been let--as each revolving season came round--to the highest bidder. It was not a very dignified proceeding, and her children (her sons especially) had chafed both inwardly and outwardly against what _they_ considered their mother’s “dirty economy,” in thus making money out of the family bricks and mortar. The tide of public opinion in London, as well as in the country, set strongly against the wealthy, parsimonious widow, whose accumulated riches benefited so few of the persons whom common sense, as well as the laws of nature and of precedent, pointed out as amongst those destined to reap advantage from the seed scattered by Lady Millicent’s hand; while, as regarded her ladyship’s sons, it was a melancholy fact, that for lack of a home, humanly speaking, those young gentlemen had in their nonage gone a good deal, as the saying is, “to the bad.” During the two years following on Cecil Vavasour’s death, and while the _achievement_ commemorative of that melancholy event still hung suspended between the second-floor front windows of the a “noble town mansion,” it was only right and proper that in the widow’s house there should be no “receptions”--no sounds of merriment, no glancings of merry twinkling feet, within the silent, solid walls of Lady Millicent’s deserted house. But when the years of mourning were at an end, and the “time for setting on of meat” had come--there arose by degrees a spirit of discontent against the widowed millionaire. On account of her children--this was the way that they, the aggrieved ones, put it--it was wrong, unmotherly on Lady Millicent’s part to hide the light of her countenance from the world. There were certain duties incumbent--as nobody would venture to deny--upon the rich, and the chief and foremost of those duties was the exercise of a genial hospitality. The good of trade too, both as regarded the expenditure of Lady Millicent’s family, in London and in the country, was not a matter to be lightly regarded. The West-end shop-keepers had a right, honest tradesmen that they were, to expect that a sixth part at least of Lady Millicent’s income--an income of say 60,000_l._ per annum--should find its way to their pockets. To say nothing of example--so spoke the public voice--why, what a sin and a shame it was for a lady possessed of such countless