"Oh, my dear Frank, if you really want to know, I am the man for you--Old Cotton of Dundee, four and a half and his daughter, took off the balance of the six. What do you think I heard him whisper to her?--'Hoot, lassie, tak it aff, it's a' paid for;' and she, poor soul, was forced to gulp it down, that he might have the satisfaction of knowing that full value had been given for his penny. Then there was Runrig the farmer from Mid-Lothian, half-a-dozen. The man has a frame of iron, and a cheek as fresh as new-mown hay; but somebody had told him the water would do him good, and he has accordingly taken enough to make him ill for a fortnight. Then there was Deacon Dobie's rich widow--fat, fair, and forty--she got pretty well through the seventh tumbler; but, it's a way with her, when she begins drinking, not to know when to stop; which, by the way, may account for her having been, for some time, as she elegantly expresses it, 'gey an nervish ways, whiles.' After her came"---- And Stukeley was going on to enumerate the different visitors of the morning, checking them off upon his fingers as he proceeded, when his friend, Frank Preston, stopped him. "For mercy's sake, have done; and tell me, if you can, who those two fops of fellows are at the foot of the room? They only came a week ago; and, though nobody knows who they are, they have made the acquaintance of half the people here." "I see nothing very odd in that. I know nothing of the men; but they dress well, and are moderately good-looking, and have just sufficient assurance to pass off upon the uninitiated for ease of manner and fashionable breeding. A pair of parvenus, no doubt; but what is your motive for asking so particularly about them?" "Oh, nothing, nothing! Only I am to meet them at the Cheeshams to-night, and I wished to know something of them." "So, so! sets the wind in that quarter? A rival, Master Frank? It is there the shoe pinches, is it?" "A rival--nonsense! What should I care whether the puppies are attentive to Emily Cheesham or not?" "Why more to her than to her sister Fanny? I mentioned no names. Ha! Master Frank, you see I have caught you. Come, come, tell me what it is annoys you?" "Well," stammered out Frank Preston,--"well, the fact is--the fact is, one of them has been rather particular in his attentions to Emily, and I am half-inclined to think she gives him encouragement." "And, suppose she does, I see nothing in that but the harmless vanity of a girl, pleased to have another dangler under her spell." "That is all very well, but I don't like it a bit. It may be so, and it may not. Her encouragement to him is very marked, and I don't feel easy under it at all, I don't."