Mrs. Massarene had conducted her visitor with great obsequiousness to the head of the staircase, and would have gone down the stairs with her had not Lady Kenilworth prevented such a demonstration. “My dear creature, pray don’t! One only does that for royalty,” she had said, while a repressed grin was visible through the impassive masks of all the footmen’s faces where they stood above and below. “How ever is one to know what’s right and what’s wrong,” thought the mistress of Harrenden House, resting her hands for a moment upon the carved rail of the balustrade, and eyeing nervously the naked boy of Clodion. That statue was very terrible to her; “To set a lad without any scrap o’ clothes on a-beckoning with a bird to everybody as come upstairs, I can’t think as it’s decent or proper,” she said constantly to her husband. But a master hand had indicated the top of the staircase as the proper place for that nude young falconer to stand, in all his mingled realism and idealization; therefore, no one could be bold enough to move him elsewhere, and he leaned airily against the old choir-carving, and wore a fawn-like smile as he tossed his hawk above his head and stretched his hand outward as though to beckon the crowds, which would not come, up that silent stair. But the crowds were coming now! For where Lady Kenilworth pointed, the world would surely follow; and the heart of simple Margaret Massarene, late Margaret Hogan, dairymaid of Kilrathy, County Down, beat high in her breast under the red and gold of her gorgeous bodice. “It’s mighty hard work being a lady,” she thought, “but since I’ve got to be one, I’d like to go the whole hog, and show Kathleen when she comes back to us that we are as smart gentlefolks as any of her friends.” When Mr. Massarene came home to dinner that evening, his wife felt that she had great news to give him. “I think she’ll take us up, William,” she said, almost under her breath. “But I think she’ll want a lot of palm-grease.” She was a simple woman, of coarse views and expressions. “Whatever my lady wants she shall have,” reflected her husband, but his heavy brows frowned; for he was a man who did not like even the wife of his bosom to see into his intentions, and if he were going to buy his way into that society where his shooting-irons were of no use to him, he did not care for even the “old ’ooman” to know it.