Ethel ran on, and gained the Dolphin, entering it by the more familiar door that stood open opposite the beach. Mr. and Mrs. Bent were both in the room: he, reading his favourite weekly newspaper by the fire, the Stilborough Herald: she, sitting at the table under the window, stoning a plate of raisins. The receipt Ethel had asked for lay ready. "You'll please tell Mrs. Castlemaine, Miss Ethel, that more or less pounded mace can be put according to taste," observed the landlady, as she handed Ethel the paper. "There's no particular quantity specified. It's strong: and a little of it goes a great way." Ethel sat down by the table, putting a raisin into her mouth. John, who had risen to greet her, resumed his seat again. To say the truth, Miss Ethel liked running into the Dolphin: it made an agreeable interlude to the general dulness of Greylands' Rest. The screen introduced into the room during the late wintry weather, had been taken away again. Mrs. Bent had a great mind to break it up, and burn it; but for that screen Ethel Reene would not have overheard those dangerous words. But no allusion had been made to the affair since, by any one of them: all three seemed content to ignore it. "You must excuse my going on with my work, Miss Ethel," said Mrs. Bent. "We've got a dinner on to-night, and I had no notice of it till a few minutes ago. Some grand Inspector-General of the coastguard stations is here to-day; and he and two or three more gentlemen are going to dine here this evening. Mr. Castlemaine, I fancy, is to be one of them." "Mr. Castlemaine is!" cried Ethel. "Either him or Mr. Harry. I b'lieve it's him. And me with not a raisin in the house stoned for plum-pudding! I must make haste if I am to get it boiled. It's not often I'm taken unawares like this." "If you will give me an apron to put on, I'll help you to stone them," said Ethel, taking off her black gloves. "Now, Miss Ethel! As if I'd let you do anything of the kind! But that's just like you--always ready to do anybody a good turn." "You give me the apron, please." "I couldn't. If any of them from Greylands' Rest happened to look in, they'd be fit to snap at me; and at you, too, Miss Ethel. Seeing you stoning plums, indeed! There's no need, either: I am three parts through them." Ethel began to do a few without the apron, in a desultory kind of way, and eat two or three more. John Bent came to some paragraph in the newspaper that excited his ire. "Hear this!" he cried in anger. "Hear it, Miss Ethel! What a shame!" "We have been given to understand that the rumour so freely circulated during this past week, of a matrimonial engagement having been made between Mr. Blake-Gordon and the heiress of Mountsorrel, has had no foundation in fact." "The villain!" cried Mrs. Bent, momentarily forgetting her work. "He can hardly be bad enough to think of another yet."