The footman would fain have escorted Mrs. Granger the way she should go, and held himself in readiness to accompany her into the house; but she waved him aside on the threshold of the darksome _porte-cochere_, out of which no coach ever came nowadays. "I shan't want you, Trotter," she said. "Tell Jarvis to walk the horses gently up and down. I shall not be very long." The man bowed and obeyed, wondering what business his mistress could have in such a dingy street, "on the Surrey side of the water, too," as he said to his comrade. Austin was out, but Mrs. Lovel was at home, and it was Mrs. Lovel whom Clarissa had come chiefly to see. The same tawdrily-dressed maid admitted her to the same untidy sitting-room, a shade more untidy to-day, where Bessie Lovel was dozing in an easy-chair by the fire, while the two boys played and squabbled in one of the windows. Mrs. Granger, entering suddenly, radiant in golden-brown moire and sables, seemed almost to dazzle the eyes of Austin's wife, who had not seen much of the brighter side of existence. Her life before her marriage had been altogether sordid and shabby, brightness or luxury of any kind for her class being synonymous with vice; and Bessie Stanford the painter's model had never been vicious. Her life since her marriage had been a life of trouble and difficulty, with only occasional glimpses of a spurious kind of brilliancy. She lived outside her husband's existence, as it were, and felt somehow that she was only attached to him by external links, as a dog might have been. He had a certain kind of affection for her, was conscious of her fidelity, and grateful for her attachment; and there an end. Sympathy between them there was none; nor had he ever troubled himself to cultivate her tastes, or attempted in the smallest degree to bring her nearer to him. To Bessie Lovel, therefore, this sister of her husband's, in all the glory of her fresh young beauty and sumptuous apparel, seemed a creature of another sphere, something to be gazed upon almost in fear and trembling. "I beg your parding!" she faltered, rubbing her eyes. She was apt, when agitated, to fall back upon the pronunciation of her girlhood, before Austin Lovel had winced and ejaculated at her various mutilations of the language. "I was just taking forty winks after my bit of dinner." "I am so sorry I disturbed you," said Clarissa, in her gracious way. "You were tired, I daresay." "O, pray don't mention it! I'm sure I feel it a great compliment your comin'. It must seem a poor place to you after your beautiful house in the Roo de Morny. Austin told me where you lived; and I took the liberty of walking that way one evening with a lady friend. I'm sure the houses are perfect palaces."