‘Yet after all,’ she said presently, with a playful air, ‘it isn’t as if you were a brewer, you know! So many brewers and building contractors become lords nowadays, that somehow I always connect the peerage with Beer and Bricks. I suppose it’s very wrong, but I can’t help it. And it will seem odd to me at first to associate you with the two B’s—you are so different to the usual type.’ He smiled,—well pleased to see her eyes resting upon him with the tender admiration to which he had become accustomed. ‘Is luncheon ready?’ he asked, after a brief pause, during which he was satisfied that he looked his best and that she was fully aware of it. ‘Yes; let us go down and partake thereof,’ she answered gaily. ‘Will you tell the servants, or shall I?’ ‘Tell the servants what?’ he demanded, with a slight frown. She turned her pretty head over her shoulder laughingly. ‘Why, to call you for the future “My Lord,” or “m’lud.” Which shall it be?’ She looked charmingly provocative; his momentary ill-humour passed, and he flung an arm round her waist and kissed her. ‘Whichever you please,’ he said. ‘Anyway you are, as you always have been, “my” lady!’ *CHAPTER II* Delicia was perfectly right when she said that her new distinction would draw ‘extra snobs’ around her. A handle to one’s name invariably attracts all the social ‘runaways,’—in the same fashion that mischievous street-boys are attracted to bang at a particularly ornate and glittering door-knocker and then scamper off in hiding before any servant has time to answer the false summons. People who are of old and good family themselves think nothing of titles, but those who have neither good birth, breeding nor education, attach a vast amount of importance to these placards of rank, and can never refrain from an awe-stricken expression of countenance when introduced to a duke, or with-hold the regulation ‘royalty-dip’ when in the presence of some foreign ‘princess,’ who, as a matter of fact, has no right to ‘royalty’ honours at all. Delicia had met a great many such small dignitaries, but she never curtsied to any of them, whereat their petty vanity was wounded, and they thought, ‘These authors have bad manners.’ She read their thoughts and smiled, but did not care. She reserved her salutations for Royalty itself, not for the imitation of it. And now that she was a ‘ladyship,’ she obtained a good deal of amusement out of the study of character among her various ‘friends’ who envied and grudged her the trumpery honour. The Tookseys and Snookseys of society could scarcely contain themselves for spite when they learned that for the future they would have to speak of the ‘female authoress’ as Lady Carlyon. The Casual Caller and the One Man began to allude to her as ‘Delicia, Lady Carlyon,’ rolling the sweet, quaint name of ‘Delicia’ on their tongues with a keener sense of enjoyment than usual in its