nothing else soothes it. And you who are
so rich, and so young, and so clever, might
do a deal of good. You don't know the
suffering there is in the world that a few
copper coins would lighten. I feel your
confidence in writing to me very much.
But I wish for your sake that you would
have no secrets from your husband. You
ask me to come and see you. I cannot just
at present. My mother is very ill; and
there is an epidemic fever in the parish.
My life is not altogether a bed of roses."

Within a week after the receipt of that
letter, Mrs. Plew was dead. And the
Prince and Princess de' Barletti had gone
away to London in great haste; for a
malignant form of typhus fever was raging
in Shipley Magna.

CHAPTER X. A FRIENDLY TEA-DRINKING.

IT was near the end of a very sultry
summer day in London—a day in the quite
late summer. The people who were able
to leave town next week pronounced that
the season was over. The people whose
business, or interest, or impecuniosity
obliged them to linger a while longer,
declared that there was so much going on still,
they positively didn't know how to keep all
their engagements.

It was, however, near enough to the
period styled by London tradesmen "the
fag end of the season" to bring it to pass
that Miss Betsy Boyce had no dinner
invitation for that day, and no invitation to
any later assembly, and that she was
consequently drinking tea at about half-past
seven o'clock in Mr. Lovegrove's house in
Bedford-square.

Betsy Boyce was quite free from any
vulgar prejudices on the score of fashionable
or unfashionable hours. She would
drink tea at seven o'clock, or dine at eight,
or breakfast at any hour from nine A.M. to
two P.M. with perfectly accommodating good
humour.

"It matters very little what you call a
meal," she would say. "If you eat
between eight and nine o'clock at night, and
like to call that dinner, I'm quite content.
If you have your real solid dinner at
two or three, and your old-fashioned tea
at five or six, and like to call that lunch,
or kettle-drum, or anything else, I'm
equally content. When one lives in the
world one must do as the world does in
those matters. I have heard papa say that
when he was at Vienna, and knew the
old Prince Metternich, he has seen him
often at a grand banquet, playing with a
plateful of brown bread-and-butter, and
tasting nothing else. Well, he ate his
wholesome food at a wholesome hour, of
course. But he never thought of changing
people's manners and customs. No more
do I."

Something of this kind she had said in
answer to Mrs. Lovegrove's ostentatiously
humble apology for inviting her to tea at
seven o'clock.

"It is not," said Mrs. Lovegrove, with a,
kind of virtuous, self-denying severity that
would have exasperated any one less
genuinely tolerant and good-natured than
Betsy Boyce, "it is not that I do not
understand the usages of the circles in
which you habitually move. It would be
strange, bred up as I was at our place
in the country among the élite of our
country society—you won't mind my saying
that country society is, as a general
rule, more exclusive, and more rigid, on
the score of birth, than the mixed and ever-
varying circles of the metropolis?—it would
be strange if I did not understand those
usages."

"To be sure," said Miss Boyce,
pleasantly. "What good cake this is! Thanks;
I will have a piece more of it."

"But when I married Mr. Lovegrove I
put all that aside at once, and for ever. I
looked my position in the face, and accepted
all its conditions."

"And a very comfortable position it is,
too, Mrs. Lovegrove. And excessively
delighted a good many ladies of my
acquaintance would be to jump into such another."

It will be perceived that the acquaintance
between Mrs. Lovegrove and Miss
Boyce, begun in Mrs. Frost's drawing-
room, had advanced towards something
like intimacy.

Betsy Boyce was, as she herself declared,
eminently a social being. She was just
as cheerful and content in the solicitor's
house in Bedford-square as at my lord
duke's in Carlton-gardens. And whilst she
regaled the lawyer's wife with stories of the
Olympian feasts she shared with the gods
and goddesses, whose mythology (carefully
edited with a view to its meeting the public
eye) is contained in Sir Bernard Burke's
red volumes, she never offended her hosts
by appearing to despise their earthlier
hospitality.

Mr. Lovegrove considered Miss Boyce
to possess extraordinary spirits and an
immense fund of anecdote. Mrs. Lovegrove
said she had a pensive pleasure in her
conversation, as it reminded her of the old