Flo greeted her dearest Cecil with enthusiasm, and saluted Mr. O'Boyneville with the faintest indication of a curtsey as she swept her silken skirts past him; and then, when she had shaken hands with her dearest friend, she turned to look at the barrister with a charming insolent little look, which seemed to express, "And what outlandish creature are _you_, I wonder?" Of course Mr. Crawford knew the great Q. C. Almost every male inhabitant of London was familiar with that ponderous figure and defiant face. Few were the dwellers in the mighty City who had not seen those big white hands waved in the face of an opponent, or lifted in the denunciatory periods of virtuous indignation. The painter began to talk to the barrister, and in a moment the great Laurence was at his ease. He knew how to talk--with men,--and there was no question within the regions of heaven or earth too mighty for his audacity, too small for his powers of argument. He would have talked to Herschel about the last discovery in the starry system; and it is ten to one but in a mixed company he would have made Herschel look foolish: he would have demonstrated before the face of Newton that his theory of gravitation was a false one; he would have offered for Mr. Paul Bedford's consideration new views upon the subject of "Jolly Nose;" or if a question of tailoring had arisen in an assembly of tailors, he would have proved to the satisfaction of the company that he alone amongst them all had fully mastered the science of cutting out a coat. Was it not his business to know every thing, or to seem to know every thing? If any mad-brained counsel on the opposite side had been pleased to set a flute or "recorder" before him, would it not have been his duty to play a tune thereupon for the edification of the court? There was no subject that he had not been called upon to handle in the course of his legal career. He had pleaded the cause of a musician whose copyright in a ballad had been assailed on the ground of plagiarism, and--ignorant of a note of music--had talked the jury into idiocy with a farrago of sounding nonsense such as "the syncopated passage in the second bar of my client's composition, gentlemen, is said to resemble the third bar of Mozart's sonato in C minor; but to any one who is familiar with the first principles of harmony, gentlemen, the introduction of the supertonic in place of the subdominant must be a convincing proof of the falsehood of this assertion: and if any thing were required to demonstrate the puerility of the argument adopted by my learned friend on the other side, it would be the group of semiquavers which concludes the phrase." He had carried a French milliner triumphantly through all the intricacies of an action against an aristocratic customer for the recovery of a disputed account, and had demonstrated with crushing force the meanness of the lady defendant, and the honesty of his client's charges. To the