So, with mutual friendship and goodwill, they parted--Elizabeth to join her sisters upstairs, where one was already setting the tea-kettle to boil on the gas stove, and the other spreading a snow-white cloth on the sitting-room table--Paul Brion to get half-an-hour's work and a hasty dinner before repairing to the reporters' gallery of "the House." He did not see them again for a long time, and the first news he heard of them was from Mrs. Aarons, whom he chanced to meet when she was shopping one fine morning in Collins Street. "You see, I remembered my promise," she said, when matters of more personal moment had been disposed of; "I went to see those extraordinary _protégées_ of yours." "Extraordinary--how extraordinary?" he inquired stiffly. "Well, I put it to you--_are_ they not extraordinary?" He was silent for a few seconds, and the points of his moustache went up a little. "Perhaps so--now you mention it," he said. "Perhaps they _are_ unlike the--the usual girl of the period with whom we are familiar. But I hope you were favourably impressed with your visit. Were you?" "No, I wasn't. I will be frank with you--I wasn't. I never expected to find people living in that manner--and dressing in that manner. It is not what I am used to." "But they are very lady-like--if I am any judge--and that is the chief thing. Very pretty too. Don't you think so?" "O _dear_ no! The middle one has rather nice eyes perhaps--though she gives herself great airs, I think, considering her position. And the youngest is not bad looking. _Miss_ King is _plain_, decidedly. However, I told you I would do something for them, and I have kept my word. They are coming to my next Friday. And I do _hope_," proceeded Mrs. Aarons, with an anxious face, "that they will dress themselves respectably for the reputation of my house. Do you know anyone who could speak to them about it? Could you give them a hint, do you think?" "_I!_--good gracious! I should like to see myself at it," said Paul, grimly. "But I don't think," he added, with a fatuity really pitiable in a man of his years and experience, "that there is any danger of their not looking nice. They must have had their old frocks on when you saw them." CHAPTER XI. DISAPPOINTMENT.