careful avoidance of spoken appreciation which marks the modern trifler, they took leave of the Duchess with the remark that her notion of what Yule-tide should be was not half bad. A week of dull Sundays, so to speak, had been got through capitally. "Nothing frumpish about the thing," pronounced Mrs. Penworthy, who had been asked to gratify Jim, and who had been found woefully wanting in snap. "Every one was quite up to scratch. Leah Pentland did simply ripping off her own." The little woman was not talking an unknown language, for the latest successor to Algy understood her excellently well. She spoke the gibberish of those in a hurry, which she had taken some pains to acquire. The very few words in the dictionary used by the fashionable were dropped into the melting-pot, and came out in ungrammatical lumps of misused adjectives and verbs with a paucity of pronouns and prepositions. Mrs. Penworthy, whose sense of humour was strong, had proposed that Lionel should translate the Bible into this time-saving vernacular, so that its spiritual meaning could be arrived at by those who thought the verse of Milton and the prose of Bacon starchy. "Wouldn't hear of it," said she, to Algy's latest successor, while munching American sweets in the up-going train. "Told him it would be spiffing to fetch the psalms up to mark, but he didn't catch on somehow. Wonder the Duchess can stand him, with his horrid correctness. She's fond of doing herself well." "Thought the Duchess had rather a shoppin' face," replied the man, meaning that his hostess had looked worried. "Don't knew why she should. Got heaps of cake to chew. Might be she missed Demetrius." "Wheresey hang out?" "Don't know. Went prancing off on his own. Got a puff?" The inheritor of Algy's shoes provided the lady with a cigarette. "Fancied she cottoned to th' Askew chap," he remarked, striking a match. "Sure she did--oh, rather! Aksakoff let on to me 'bout the boy jumping Paris to get fixed--British Embassy fixings, you know. Leah Pentland didn't bring it off somehow. Lucky for her, seeing Jim wasn't a goner. We really could not have received her," ended Mrs. Penworthy; then, aware that she had lapsed into decent English, corrected her mistake: "Mean we couldn't have let her chip into our game." "Like th' Duchess?" inquired her companion, languidly. "Don't know, quite. Saucy and swagger and all that. Freezes a bit--what? Talks like a book, you know. Awfully expensive rattle." The man nodded. "Thought she wasn't up to dick. Daresay she'll spin along on her own freely, when the hump's off." "Hump? She hasn't got the hump, or the needle either." "Very saucy hump," insisted the male linguist--"quite birdish. Sorry the old Duke an' Frith hopped, maybe." "How very unnatural!" sighed Mrs. Penworthy, reverting to English in her disgust. "Quite too awf'l to think how luck hooks on to her. Really makes one wish to be a bad woman, to see how she lands the salmon," she finished more creditably.