"As if these people didn't have tempers, and quarrel about money! Of course they do! And if they don't--well, we all know how easy it is to be amiable on fifty thousand a year." * * * * * After dinner Mrs. Allison led the way to the "Green Drawing-room." This room, hung with Gainsborough portraits, was one of the sights of the house, and tonight Marcella Maxwell especially looked round her on entering it, with enchantment. "You happy people!" she said to Mrs. Allison. "I never come into this room without anxiously asking myself whether I am fit to make one of the company. I look at my dress, or I am doubtful about my manners, or I wish someone had taught me to dance the minuet!" "Yes," said Betty Leven, running up to a vast picture, a life-size family group, which covered the greater part of the farther wall of the room. "What a vulgar, insignificant chit one feels oneself without cap or powder!--without those ruffles, or those tippets, or those quilted petticoats! Mrs. Allison, _may_ my maid come down to-morrow while we are at dinner and take the pattern of those ruffles? No--no! she sha'n't! Sacrilege! You pretty thing!" she said, addressing a figure--the figure of a girl in white with thin virginal arms and bust, who seemed to be coming out of the picture, almost to be already out of it and in the room. "Come and talk to me. Don't think any more of your father and mother there. You have been curtsying to them for a hundred years; and they are rather dull, stupid people, after all. Come and tell us secrets. Tell us what you have seen in this room--all the foolish people making love, and the sad people saying good-bye." Betty was kneeling on a carved chair, her pretty arms leaning on the back of it, her eyes fixed half-in laughter, half in sentiment, on the figure in the picture. Lady Maxwell suddenly moved closer to her, and Letty heard her say in a low voice, as she put her hand on Lady Leven's arm: "Don't, Betty! _don't!_ It was in this room he proposed to her, and it was in this room he said goodbye. Maxwell has often told me. I believe she never comes in here alone--only for ceremony and when there is a crowd." A look of consternation crossed Lady Leven's lively little face. She glanced shyly towards Mrs. Allison. That lady had moved hastily away from the group in front of the picture. She was sitting by herself, looking straight before her, with a certain stiffness, her thin hands crossed on her knee. Betty impetuously went towards her, and was soon sitting on a stool beside her, chattering to her and amusing her. Meanwhile Marcella invited Lady Tressady to come and sit with her on a sofa beneath the great picture. Letty followed her, settled her satin skirts in their most graceful folds, put one little foot on a Louis Quinze footstool which seemed to invite it, and then began to inform herself about the house and the family.