The Colonel comes to Park Street early in the forenoon, when the mistress of the house, surrounded by her little ones, is administering dinner to them. He behaves with splendid courtesy to Miss Quigley, the governess, and makes a point of taking wine with her, and of making a most profound bow during that ceremony. Miss Quigley cannot help thinking Colonel Newcome’s bow very fine. She has an idea that his late Majesty must have bowed in that way: she flutteringly imparts this opinion to Lady Anne’s maid; who tells her mistress, who tells Miss Ethel, who watches the Colonel the next time he takes wine with Miss Quigley, and they laugh, and then Ethel tells him; so that the gentleman and the governess have to blush ever after when they drink wine together. When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, or in that before-mentioned paradise nigh to Apsley House, faint signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear Colonel amongst a thousand horsemen. If Ethel makes for her uncle purses, guard-chains, antimacassars, and the like beautiful and useful articles, I believe it is in reality Miss Quigley who does four-fifths of the work, as she sits alone in the schoolroom, high, high up in that lone house, when the little ones are long since asleep, before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little desk containing her mother’s letters and her mementos of home. There are, of course, numberless fine parties in Park Lane, where the Colonel knows he would be very welcome. But if there be grand assemblies, he does not care to come. “I like to go to the club best,” he says to Lady Anne. “We talk there as you do here about persons, and about Jack marrying, and Tom dying, and so forth. But we have known Jack and Tom all our lives, and so are interested in talking about them. Just as you are in speaking of your own friends and habitual society. They are people whose names I have sometimes read in the newspaper, but whom I never thought of meeting until I came to your house. What has an old fellow like me to say to your young dandies or old dowagers?” “Mamma is very odd and sometimes very captious, my dear Colonel,” said Lady Anne, with a blush; “she suffers so frightfully from tic that we are all bound to pardon her.”