However, presently her drooping crest began to rise. If Lady Piercey had but known the errand upon which Patty was going, the intention with which she had dressed herself in all her Sunday clothes, taken her gloves from their box, and her parasol out of its cover! The consciousness of what that object had been returned to Patty’s mind in a moment, and brought back the colour to her cheeks. “Ah, my lady! you think it’s something far off, as you’ve got time to fight against, and shut him up and take him away! If you but knew that it may happen to-morrow, or day after to-morrow, and Patty Hewitt become Mrs. Gervase Piercey in spite of you!” This thought filled Patty with new energy. It would be still sweeter to do it thus, under their very nose, as it were, after they had driven away triumphant, thinking they had crushed Patty. It was perhaps natural, that in the heat of opposition and rising pugnaciousness, the girl should have turned her bitterest thought upon the spectator sitting by, who had not said a word, and whose sympathies were, if not on her side, at least not at all on that of the other belligerent. “That white-faced maypole of a thing!” Patty said to herself with a virulence of opposition to the dependent which exists in both extremes of society. The old lady she recognised as having a right to make herself as disagreeable as she pleased, but the bystander, the silent spectator looking on, the cousin, or whatever she was--what had she to do with it? Patty clenched her hand, in which she had been limply holding her parasol, and vowed to herself that that Mrs. Osborne should know who was who before they had done with each other, or she, Patty, would know the reason why. Poor Margaret! who had neither wished to be there, nor aided and abetted in any way Patty’s momentary discomfiture; but it frequently happens that the victim of the strife is a completely innocent person, only accidentally concerned.