While a full half of the crowd was being conveyed to the course by innumerable trains, the sunny road was alive with vehicles of every description--spring-carts and lorries, cabs and buggies, broughams and landaus, and four-in-hand coaches--all filled to their utmost capacity, and displaying the sweetest things in bonnets and parasols. And amongst the best-appointed carriages Major Duff-Scott's was conspicuous, not only for its build and finish, and the excellence of the horses that drew it, and the fit of the livery of the coachman who drove it, but for the beauty and charming costumes of the ladies inside. The major himself, festive in light grey, with his member's card in his button-hole and his field-glass slung over his shoulder, occupied the place of the usual footman on the box seat in order that all the three sisters should accompany his wife; and Mrs. Duff-Scott, having set her heart on dressing her girls for the occasion, had been allowed to have her own way, with the happiest results. The good woman sat back in her corner, forgetting her own Parisian elegance and how it would compare with the Cup Day elegance of rival matrons in the van of rank and fashion, while she revelled in the contemplation of the young pair before her, on whom her best taste had been exercised. Elizabeth, by her side, was perfectly satisfactory in straw-coloured Indian silk, ruffled with some of her own fine old lace, and wearing a delicate French bonnet and parasol to match, with a bunch of Camille de Rohan roses at her throat for colour; but Elizabeth was not a striking beauty, nor of a style to be experimented on. Patty and Eleanor were; and they had been "treated" accordingly. Patty was a harmony in pink--the faintest shell-pink--and Eleanor a study in the softest, palest shade of china-blue; both their dresses being of muslin, lightly frilled, and tied round the waist with sashes; while they wore bewitching little cap-like bonnets, with swathes of tulle under their chins. The effect--designed for a sunny morning, and to be set off by the subdued richness of her own olive-tinted robes--was all that Mrs. Duff-Scott anticipated. The two girls were exquisitely sylph-like, and harmonious, and refined--looking prettier than they had ever done in their lives, because they knew themselves that they were looking so--and it was confidently expected by their chaperon that they would do considerable execution before the day was over. At the back of the carriage was strapped a hamper containing luncheon sufficient for all the potential husbands that the racecourse might produce, and Mrs. Duff-Scott was prepared to exercise discriminating but extensive hospitality.