QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER XX. LILY GOES OUT TO DINNER.

THE handsome lady, who, probably to serve
her own purposes, had been bland and almost
affable while the treaty of peace with the
Bunnycastles and Mr. Drax was being concluded, was
seemingly of a most capricious disposition. At
all events, she informed Lily, so soon as they
were outside the gate of Rhododendron House,
that she would box her ears well, if she made
any noise, or gave her any further trouble; and
the child, quite unaccustomed to harsh treatment,
or even threats, followed her new protectress
in a very subdued, but scarcely cheerful
manner.

The Clapham stage — peace to its short memory
— was in existence in those days, and it
was by means of this conveyance that Lily was
brought to the metropolis. First of all, however,
the lady took her into a pastrycook's shop, and
bought her a very large Bath bun, which she
apparently considered a sovereign remedy for
all the sorrows of childhood, for when Lily had
half eaten it, she said to her, not quite so
sharply as before:

"Now, are you quite happy?"

Lily had not attained the summit of human
felicity, but she deemed it expedient to temporise
with a personage so stern as the personage
who talked of boxing her ears. She murmured
an affirmative.

"That's right," pursued the lady. "Be a
gentle little darling, very sage and obedient, and
I will love you. Don't vex me, or I shall have
an attack of nerves. Satanée migraine, va!"
This last remark she made in a language which
Lily did not understand; and she noticed that
the lady made remarks, in the same incomprehensible
tongue, rather frequently. She noticed,
also, that the lady, after bestowing on her the
Bath bun, ate a macaroon herself, and called
for a glass of cherry brandy; that, after drinking
it, she declared it to be " detestable," and
demanded a glass of water, the which beverage she
characterised as "infamous poison." Likewise,
Lily noted that her protectress apostrophised
the young person in ribbons and ringlets who
officiated behind the counter of the pastrycook
as an " impertinent " — an impertinent, simply,
not an impertinent anything — and that she
vehemently protested that there was a badhalf-
penny among her change. The change itself she
flung at the head of a beggar-boy, who was
lurking at the door, licking his lips at sight
of the greasy delicacies in the twopenny tray;
but the handful of halfpence hurt the side of his
head so that he yelped with pain, and forbore
to thank her. Then, she swept out of the
shop, nearly overturning an old gentleman in
a white hat, who was seated on a cane-
bottomed chair, meekly lunching on a sausage-
roll, and leaving the young lady in ribbons and
ringlets in semi-hysterics of indignant mortifications.

There were two inside places vacant in the
Clapham stage, and Lily, for the second time in
her life, was installed in a coach. She had been
such a little recluse at school, that the great
outside world seemed almost as strange to her
as it might to a cloistered nun, transferred, for
some occult monastic reason or other, from
convent to convent.

Lily gazed about her as wistfully and as
earnestly as ever a nun could do; but she wore
no veil, nor had she a breviary; so she began to
ask the lady a host of questions about the things
on the road, which she saw from the windows of
the stage; as who lived in those tall houses;
why there were gates and bars across the road,
with men in white aprons, and with red faces, who
darted out of the little hovels, and seemed so
angry — to judge from their hoarse voices —
whenever a carriage came through. The lady
was not very communicative. Once or twice,
she said "Absurd!" Then, she cried "Peste!"
At last, she bade the child be silent.

The journey, however, was saved from being
entirely uneventful, by a few fierce verbal
encounters between the lady and the two other
inside passengers. One of these, a tall young
man, with weak eyes, an eruptive countenance,
speckled stockings and shoes, the lady accused
of rudely staring at her. She called him several
injurious names, and made him generally so
miserable, that the young man, well-nigh moved
to tears, got out at Kennington Common,
foregoing half the amount of locomotion to which
lie was entitled. Then she had a passage of arms
with an old gentleman in a bottle-green spencer
and a frill, whom she charged with having wilfully
trodden on her feet; but, in this last case, she
had reckoned without her host, for it turned out