"Please to walk through this way, ma'am--Miss Hodges is above stairs--she shall be apprized directly--Jenny! run up stairs," said Mrs. Bertrand to her maid--"run up stairs, and tell Miss Hodges here's a young lady wants to see her in a great hurry--You'd best sit down, ma'am," continued Mrs. Bertrand to Angelina, "till the girl has been up with the message." "Oh, my Araminta! how my heart beats!" exclaimed Miss Warwick. "How my mouth waters!" cried Betty Williams, looking round at the fruit and confectionaries. "Would you, ma'am, be pleased," said Mrs. Bertrand, "to take a glass of ice this warm evening? cream-ice, or water-ice, ma'am? pine-apple or strawberry ice?" As she spoke, Mrs. Bertrand held a salver, covered with ices, toward Miss Warwick: but, apparently, she thought that it was not consistent with the delicacy of friendship to think of eating or drinking when she was thus upon the eve of her first interview with her Araminta. Betty Williams, who was of a different _nature_ from our heroine, saw the salver recede with excessive surprise and regret; she stretched out her hand after it, and seized a glass of raspberry-ice; but no sooner had she tasted it than she made a frightful face, and let the glass fall, exclaiming-- "Pless us! 'tis not as good as cooseherry fool." Mrs. Bertrand next offered her a cheesecake, which Betty ate voraciously. "She's actually a female Sancho Panza!" thought Angelina: her own more striking resemblance to the female Quixote never occurred to our heroine--so blind are we to our own failings. "Who is the young lady?" whispered the mistress of the fruit shop to Betty Williams, whilst Miss Warwick was walking--we should say _pacing_--up and down the room, in _anxious solicitude, and evident agitation_. "Hur's a young lady," replied Betty, stopping to take a mouthful of cheesecake between every member of her sentence, "a young lady--that has--lost hur--" "Her heart--so I thought." "Hur purse!" said Betty, with an accent, which showed that she thought this the more serious loss of the two. "Her purse!--that's bad indeed:--you pay for your own cheesecake and raspberry-ice, and for the glass that you broke," said Mrs. Bertrand. "Put hur has a great deal of money in hur trunk, I pelieve, at Llanwaetur," said Betty. "Surely Miss Hodges does not know I am here," cried Miss Warwick--"her Angelina!" "Ma'am, she'll be down immediately, I do suppose," said Mrs. Bertrand. "What was it you pleased called for--angelica, ma'am, did you say? At present we are quite out, I'm ashamed to say, of angelica, ma'am--Well, child," continued Mrs. Bertrand to her maid, who was at this moment seen passing by the back door of the shop in great haste. "Ma'am--anan," said the maid, turning back her cap from off her ear. "Anan! deaf doll! didn't you hear me tell you to tell Miss Hodges a lady wanted to speak to her in a great hurry?"