Squire Warrender sat asleep in his chair, his face covered by a big brown bandanna, so that actually Spunyarn and Lucy were practically alone. But the young lord didn't attempt to renew his attentions to Lucy. In his own mind Spunyarn perhaps felt that he was well out of it. Lucy, a past-mistress in the art of flirtation, was delicious as a friend; as a sweetheart there would have been two sides to the question; but Lucy Warrender as a wife would have been simply appalling and impossible. Lucy's bygone escapade with her uncle's second footman--for failing high game, Lucy Warrender was not above captivating even a second footman--had been carefully hushed up. It was the cause of the poor young man's receiving a month's wages on the spot and his dismissal. For Miss Hood had detected him in passing a very pink-looking letter to Lucy Warrender. Pinker far than the letter were the face and ears of the guilty domestic, as he placed the intercepted missive in Miss Hood's hands, on her sternly ordering him to do so. Of course the letter was shown to Mr. Warrender; he was very angry under the circumstances. But the letter of the unfortunate Joseph, though it had caused him many agonies in its composition, was comic in the extreme. It was full of what the writer called "pottery;" it was the poor young fellow's first love letter. Alas, it was a mere answer to a letter of Lucy's; _she_ had commenced the correspondence; it was she who had thrown the handkerchief. Needless to say Lucy was deported at once, and Madame Planchette's, _née_ Jones, finishing establishment in the Champs Elyseés received a fresh pupil. Lucy's _minauderies_ could now only be practised on her own sex. But even there the girl succeeded in setting the whole house by the ears; and causing the sudden dismissal of the Italian professor, a gifted Piedmontese, with a gigantic head of black curly hair and long but dirty nails. At the end of a year she returned to her uncle's roof, having achieved an intimate acquaintance with French _argot_; her accent, however, was undeniable. Miss Warrender, too, now added to her already dangerous fascinations the charms of a French manner and a Parisian accent. But her persistent secret studies of the works of Flaubert, Zola and Co. probably had not improved her mind. As soon as Miss Hood left the room, Lucy seized the opportunity, on finding herself thus practically alone with Lord Spunyarn, to give him a rather florid rendering of "_C'est dans le nez que ça me chatouille_," in which she out-heroded Herod, and was even more piquante and suggestive than Madame Chaumont herself. However, it did Spunyarn at all events no harm, French being a sealed book to him. The strains of the syren at last woke her uncle, and brought back Miss Hood, who suggested that it was late. And the party broke up at last at her instigation. CHAPTER III. THE VILLAGE DORCAS.