They had scarcely exchanged greetings with each other when, out of an open carriage at the gate, stepped Mrs. Duff-Scott, on her way to that extensive kettle-drum which was held in the Exhibition at this hour. When she saw her girls, their festive raiment, and their cavaliers, the fairy godmother's face was a study. "What!" she exclaimed, with heart-rending reproach, "you are back in Melbourne! You are walking about with--with your friends"--hooking on her eye-glass the better to wither poor Mr. Brion, who wasted upon her a bow that would have done credit to Lord Chesterfield--"and _I_ am not told!" Patty came forward, radiant with suppressed excitement. "She must be told," exclaimed the girl, breathlessly. "Elizabeth, we are all here now. And it is Mrs. Duff-Scott's _right_ to know what we know. And Mr. Yelverton's too." "You may tell them now," said Elizabeth, who was as white as the muslin round her chin. "Take them all to Mrs. Duff-Scott's house, and explain everything, and get it over--while I go home." CHAPTER XLI. MR. YELVERTON STATES HIS INTENTIONS. "I don't think you know Mr. Brion," said Mr. Yelverton, first lifting his hat and shaking hands with Mrs. Duff-Scott, and then, with an airy and audacious cheerfulness, introducing the old man (whose name and association with her _protégées_ she immediately recalled to mind); "Mr. Brion--Mrs. Duff-Scott." The fairy godmother bowed frigidly, nearly shutting her eyes as she did so, and for a moment the little group kept an embarrassed silence, while a sort of electric current of intelligence passed between Patty and her new-found cousin. Mr. Yelverton was, as we say, not the same man that he had been a few hours before. Quiet in his manner, as he ever was, there was yet an aspect of glowing energy about him, an air of being at high pressure, that did not escape the immediate notice of the girl's vigilant and sympathetic eyes. I have described him very badly if I have not made the reader understand the virile breadth and strength of his emotional nature, and how it would be affected by his present situation. The hot blue blood and superfine culture of that ardent young aristocrat who became his father at such an early age, and the wholesome physical and moral solidity of the farmer's fair and rustic daughter who was his mother, were blended together in him; with the result that he was a man at all points, having all the strongest human instincts alive and active in him. He was not the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction. From the same source came a passionately quick and keen apprehension of the nature of the closest bond of all, not given to the selfish and narrow-hearted.