Again Lady Mary laughed. "You're not very wise in the choice of your friends," she said. "I am, if I can count you as one of them," I returned. She made no direct reply to this, but continued: "Can't you see that that little Doctor Chord is a traitor? He has been telling my father all you have been doing and all you have been planning, and he says you are almost simple enough to have given the papers into his own keeping no longer ago than last night." "Now, look you, Lady Mary, how much you misjudged me. The little villain asked for the papers, but he didn't get them; then he advised me to give them to a man I could trust, and when I said the only man I could trust was red-headed Paddy out yonder, he was delighted to think I was to leave them in his custody. But you can see for yourself I did nothing of the kind, and if your people thought they could get anything out of Paddy by bad language and heroic kicks they were mistaken." At that moment we had an interruption that brought our conversation to a standstill and Lady Mary to the door, outside which her mother was crying,-- "Mary, Mary! where's the key?" "Where should it be?" said Lady Mary, "but in the door." "It is not in the door," said the Countess wrathfully, shaking it as if she would tear it down. "It is in the door," said Lady Mary positively; and quite right she was, for both of us were looking at it. "It is not in the door," shouted her mother. "Some of the servants have taken it away." Then we heard her calling over the banisters to find out who had taken away the key of Lady Mary's room. There was a twinkle in Mary's eye, and a quiver in the corners of her pretty mouth that made me feel she would burst out laughing, and indeed I had some ado to keep silence myself. "What have you done with those two poor wretches you were maltreating out in the garden?" asked Lady Mary. "Oh, don't speak of them," cried the Countess, evidently in no good humour. "It was all a scandal for nothing. The red-headed beast did not have the papers. That little fool, Chord, has misled both your father and me. I could wring his neck for him, and now he is palavering your father in the library and saying he will get the papers himself or die in the attempt. It serves us right for paying attention to a babbling idiot like him. I said in the first place that that Irish baboon of an O'Ruddy was not likely to give them to the ape that follows him." "Tare-an-ounds!" I cried, clenching my fists and making for the door; but Lady Mary rattled it so I could not be heard, and the next instant she placed her snow-flake hand across my mouth, which was as pleasant a way of stopping an injudicious utterance as ever I had been acquainted with.