"I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Jocund, but it is important--it is about a bonnet," cried Mrs. Stokes gayly. "I have brought you Miss Fairfax of Abbotsmead. I am sure you will make her something quite lovely." Miss Jocund took off her glasses, and gave Bessie a deliberate, discerning look-over. "Very happy, ma'am, indeed. Blue, of course?" she said. Bessie acquiesced. "Any taste, any style?" the milliner further queried. "Yes. Give me always simplicity and no imitations," was the unhesitating, concise reply. "Miss Fairfax and I understand one another. Anything more to-day, ladies?" Bessie and Mrs. Stokes considered for a moment, and then said they would not detain Miss Jocund any longer from her newspaper. "Ah, ladies! who can exist altogether on _chiffons_?" rejoined the milliner, half apologetically. "I do love my _Times_--I call it my 'gentleman.' I cannot live without my gentleman. Yes, ladies, he does smell of tobacco. That is because he spends a day and night in the bar-parlor of the Shakespeare Tavern before he visits me. So do evil communications corrupt good manners. The door, Miss Lawson. Good-afternoon, ladies." "You must not judge of Miss Jocund as a milliner and nothing more," her chaperone instructed Bessie when they had left the shop. "She is a lady herself. Her father was Dr. Jocund, the best physician in Norminster when you could find him sober. He died, and left his daughter with only debts for a fortune; she turned milliner, and has paid every sixpence of them." Where were they to go next? Bessie recollected that her uncle Laurence lived in the vicinity of the minster, and that she had an errand to him from her grandfather. She had undertaken it cheerfully, feeling that it would be a pleasure to see her kind uncle Laurence again. There was a warmth of geniality about him that was absent from her uncle Frederick and her grandfather, and she had decided that if she was to have any friend amongst her kinsfolk, her uncle Laurence would be that friend. She was sure that her father, whom she barely knew, had been most like him. It was not far to Minster Court, and they directed their steps that way. The streets of Norminster still preserve much of their picturesque antiquity, but they are dull, undeniably dull, except on the occasion of assizes, races, fairs, and the annual assembling of the yeomanry and militia. Elections are no more the saturnalia they used to be in the good old times. Bessie was reminded of Bayeux and its sultry drowsiness as they passed into the green purlieus of the minster and under a low-browed archway into a spacious paved court, where the sun slept on the red-brick backs of the old houses. Mr. Laurence Fairfax's door was in the most remote corner, up a semi-circular flight of steps, guarded on either side by an iron railing.