Miss Angela Royston received her preserver very prettily, and thanked him with an exaggerated effusiveness which was the more embarrassing inasmuch as the company, to whom the ultimate revelation of what he had done seemed to present itself as a rather tame anti-climax, had already treated his advent (but this was by way of provincial _gaucherie_) as if it were an intrusion. The party was of the nature of a kettle-drum, it appeared, with supper to follow and genteel games. The young baronet was not yet in evidence, being ridden to some kennels across country and late in returning; but there were two or three squireens who obviously desired the moral support of his presence, and, lacking it, had so strenuously beaten about in the waste lands of their brains for ideas, as to have grown as apoplectic and nearly as expressionless as tomatoes. A notable member of the company was the Honourable Mrs. Tatty, whose turban was so immense as to give her the perpetual appearance of tilting up her nose to keep it from falling off; and whose observations invariably drew rein on the brink or pit-edge of profundity, where, when one expected much, they sat down abruptly and refused, as it were, to yield their further confidences to strangers. This lady was accompanied by a quizzical little person, a cousin from London, who was of the order of those who curry favour with their present, by laughing at their late, company; and a saturnine gentleman, addressed as Captain Luvaine--who said little, and said that as if he grudged it--completed the party. To all was Mr. Tuke presented--generally as a neighbour of a romantic cast; and it needed much of his acquired urbanity and deftness in society to carry off the situation without a show of self-consciousness. “We call you the lord of Wastelands,” said Miss Royston, with a little smiling blush, as if she offered him the fruit of her invention. Certainly she looked a very dainty body, and she bore her daintiness as if it were a burden she loved. Her fair hair, combed over her forehead and falling in ringlets on her neck, was banded with a fillet of gold like a sunbeam. Her robe was of pure white satin, clasped at one shoulder with a diamond button; and in her hand she flirted a little sparkling fan no bigger than a pheasant’s wing, and much its colour. Naturally, in the presence of this radiant bird of his feather, Mr. Tuke lost mental sight and consideration of homely Betty. “Waste lands they may be,” said he gaily; “but consecrated to beauty since you visited them.” “It was a laying on of lands, not hands,” she cried merrily in response. “I brought away a rare impression of their picturesqueness--but ’twas on my gown;” and then the fine creature must give the company the history of her introduction to the squire of romance, whom she looked at very tenderly as she eulogized him.