There are some women who are always well dressed, whose flounces and whose furbelows are ever fresh and crisp; Lucy Warrender was one of these. It would be very easy to extract from _The Queen_ a poetic description of the pretty pale blue tea-gown that Lucy Warrender wore, but I must leave it to your imagination, reader. The pale blue and the profusion of delicate filmy lace suited Lucy Warrender's dreamy blonde beauty. Seventeen years had passed lightly over her head; perhaps the golden locks were a trifle more golden than of old, and if their luxuriance was due a little to art, the secret was only known to Lucy and her maid. Her foot, thrust into a heel-less Tunisian slipper of blue velvet embroidered with seed pearls, beat the floor impatiently. The strong sunlight showed that there really were a few tiny wrinkles, faintest lines on the ivory forehead and at the corners of the pretty mouth, whose ruddy lips were arched like Cupid's bow. But though the lips were arched, the mouth was determined, almost cruel; but the cruelty of the mouth suddenly disappeared as the door opened, and the whole face was instantly illuminated by the smile that men termed infantine and angelic, but which rivals of her own sex styled affectedly sentimental. It was Lucy's maid who entered the room, a big burly woman, still the fine animal of yore, Fanchette--the Fanchette who had succeeded the unhappy Hepzibah, and who had nursed the boys Lucius and George. "I have got them, mademoiselle," she said in French, as she smoothed out a little heap of blue bank notes; "seven thousand francs as usual; and a brave pair of earrings too, to produce that from the harpies of the _Mont de Piété_ at Nice. The employé made me the usual compliment, mademoiselle, and as he paid me the money he declared that the pair of single stones were the most beautiful he had ever seen. The rascal took care not to say it till we had made our bargain. _Ciel_, I trust mademoiselle will be _en veine_ to-night, for I shan't feel easy till I see the stones sparkling again in mademoiselle's ears." Lucy counted the notes, she dismissed the _bonne_, and then she soliloquized; not in so many words, as do heroines of melodrama, but this is what she said to herself, at all events the substance of it: