The girl was looking more beautiful than ever, and there was a tell-tale colour in her cheeks and an unusual light in her soft grey eyes. As for Zaluski, he was so evidently in love, and had the audacity to look so supremely happy, that Mrs. Milton-Cleave was more than ever impressed with the gravity of the situation. The curate handed her into her victoria, and she drove home through the sheltered lanes musing sadly over the story she had heard, and wondering what Gertrude's future would be. When she reached home, however, the affair was driven from her thoughts by her children, of whom she was devotedly fond. They came running to meet her, frisking like so many kittens round her as she went upstairs to her room, and begging to stay with her while she dressed for dinner. During dinner she was engrossed with her husband; but afterwards, when she was alone in the drawing-room, I found my opportunity for working on her restless mind. "Dear me," she exclaimed, throwing aside the newspaper she had just taken up, "I ought to write to Mrs. Selldon at Dulminster about that G.F.S. girl!" As a matter of fact she ought not to have written then, the letter might well have waited till the morning, and she was over-tired and needed rest. But I was glad to see her take up her pen, for I knew I should come in most conveniently to fill up the second side of the sheet. Before long Jane Stiggins, the member who had migrated from Muddleton to Dulminster, had been duly reported, wound up, and made over to the Archdeacon's wife. Then the tired hand paused. What more could she say to her friend? "We are leading our usual quiet life here," she wrote, "with the ordinary round of tennis parties and picnics to enliven us. The children have all been wonderfully well, and I think you will see a great improvement in your god-daughter when you next come to stay with us"--"Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Milton-Cleave, "how dull and stupid I am to-night! I can't think of a single thing to say." Then at length I flashed into her mind, and with a sigh of relief and a little rising flush of excitement she went on much more rapidly.