Mrs. Massarene sighed heavily as she sat alone under her tree, her large hands folded on her lap; the lessons of society seemed to her of an overwhelming difficulty and intricacy. How could she possibly have guessed that the great Mrs. Cecil Courcy, who gave tea and bread-and-butter to kings and sang duets with their consorts, was a little shabby, pale-faced being in a deer-stalker’s hat and a worn gray ulster who had disputed _in propriâ personâ_ at the cashier’s office the charge of half a kreutzer on her bill for some iced water? As she was thinking these melancholy thoughts and meditating on the isolation of her greatness, a big rose-colored bladder struck her a sharp blow on the cheek; and at her involuntary cry of pain and surprise a little child’s voice said pleadingly, “Oh! begs ’oo pardon--vewy muss!” The rosebud face of Lady Kenilworth’s little daughter was at her knee, and its prettiness and penitence touched to the quick her warm maternal heart. “My little dear, ’tis nothing at all,” she said, stooping to kiss the child under its white lace coalscuttle bonnet. Boo submitted to the caress, though she longed to rub the place kissed by the stranger. “It didn’t hurt ’oo, did it?” she asked solicitously, and then she added in a whisper, “Has ’oo dot any sweeties?” For she saw that the lady was kind, and thought her pretty, and in her four-year-old mind decided to utilize the situation. As it chanced, Mrs. Massarene, being fond of “sweeties” herself, had some caramels in a gold bonbon-box, and she pressed them, box and all, into the little hands in their tiny tan gloves. Boo’s beautiful sleepy black eyes grew wide-awake with pleasure. “Dat’s a real dold box,” she said, with the fine instincts proper to one who will have her womanhood in the twentieth century. And slipping it in her little bosom she ran off with it to regain her nurse. Her mother was walking past at the moment with the King of Greece on one side of her, and the Duc d’Orléans on the other; wise little Boo kept aloof with her prize. But she knew not, or forgot, that her mother’s eyes were as the optic organs of the fly which can see all round at once, and possess twelve thousand facets. Ten minutes later, when the king had gone to drink his glasses of water and Prince Gamelle had gone to breakfast, Lady Kenilworth, leading her sulky and unwilling Boo by the hand, approached the tree where the lone lady sat. “You have been too kind to my naughty little girl,” she said with her sweetest smile. “She must not keep this _bonbonnière_; the contents are more than enough for a careless little trot who knocks people about with her balloon.” Mrs. Massarene, agitated almost out of speech and sense at the sight of this radiant apparition which spoke with such condescension to her, stammered thanks, excuses, protestations in an unintelligible hotchpot of confused phrases; and let the gold box fall neglected to the ground.