"Go away!" snuffled that once resolute woman, too weak to combat any longer. A feeling of despair was settling upon her like a pall. What if Mrs. Rumbell, or, worse still, if Mrs. Snograss should be passing Knickerbocker House and hear the oaths and ungenteel voices of the supposedly elegant family? No tap-room fracas at Fraunces' could have equalled the deafening hubbub. "Beshrew the old fool, she be as jealous for the lies she told of us as a Barbary pigeon." "Go away!" continued the sinking sister of the autocrat of York. That distraught-looking gentleman himself was hastening across the room with restorative salts, which one of his daughters always carried in her reticule. As he approached Georgina the Gobie snatched the bottle from his hand and drained it at a gulp. "Anything with fire-water for me," she hiccoughed. Then clutching hold of him, she sunk her voice to a whisper--"I left this sphere for drinking a quart of gillyflower scent!" Julie began to weep softly--"Oh, Aunt Jane, if you were only here! Our Aunt Jane was different from these people," she wailed to herself, half apologetically. She was fond of studying the picture in the other room and could have traced it from memory. Raising her eyes, she gave a prolonged shriek. The fish-fag and some of the Makemies were dragging her beloved Jane over Lady Lyron's court steps, out of the powdering closet. The room was becoming uproarious. Doors were opening and shutting again, letting in the moaning of the bells. The culmination of the buffoonery was approaching. "Good, Jane," sobbed Miss Julie. "Good, Jane," echoed the chorus of the spectres. Reluctant, and feigning a great stress of emotion, the poor lady was pushed into the illuminated space below the hundred-taper drop. She looked like some pretty long-vaulted effigy. In her hands she still carried the spray of milk-weed. The noise lessened for a moment. Jane gazed reproachfully at her niece, Julie, as if the indiscreet wish were the cause of her present misery, and said, in a pensive voice, "I did not want to come to-night." "I always knew you were a modest woman," said Jonathan, recovering a little of his once audacious manner. "Modest forsooth!" giggled the fish-fag diabolically, and seizing one of Jonathan's fat hands in her bony fingers, she drew it over the other's face. "Look, see the white streaks on her now! She reddened, the hussy,--or I'm not a Gobie!" "Yes, I was vain," answered the most prated-about of female Knickerbockers. "I used countless beautifiers--pearl powders, cherry salve, cupid's tints. Everything Mr. Gaine sold at the Crown. They hooked the men. When pearl powders came upon the market, I received three offers--Jenks--a tutor at King's College--not the President, as the report remains on earth--wrote me a poem in the _Weekly Gossiper_, called 'Pink and White Amanda.'"