swer with a smile before delivering it.
"Because they think you are not good enough. You are a charming girl,
beautiful and amiable, intelligent and clever, and as bien-elevee as it
is possible to be; but you are not a fit match for Lord Lambeth."

Bessie Alden was decidedly disgusted. "Where do you get such
extraordinary ideas?" she asked. "You have said some such strange things
lately. My dear Kitty, where do you collect them?"

Kitty was evidently enamored of her idea. "Yes, it would put them on
pins and needles, and it wouldn't hurt you. Mr. Beaumont is already most
uneasy; I could soon see that."

The young girl meditated a moment. "Do you mean that they spy upon
him--that they interfere with him?"

"I don't know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a
British mama may worry her son's life out."

It has been intimated that, as regards certain disagreeable things,
Bessie Alden had a fund of skepticism. She abstained on the present
occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her
sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed--that
this was a traveler's tale. Though she was a girl of a lively
imagination, there could in the nature of things be, to her sense, no
reality in the idea of her belonging to a vulgar category. What she
said aloud was, "I must say that in that case I am very sorry for Lord
Lambeth."

Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her scheme, was smiling at
her again. "If I could only believe it was safe!" she exclaimed. "When
you begin to pity him, I, on my side, am afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of your pitying him too much."

Bessie Alden turned away impatiently; but at the end of a minute she
turned back. "What if I should pity him too much?" she asked.

Mrs. Westgate hereupon turned away, but after a moment's reflection
she also faced her sister again. "It would come, after all, to the same
thing," she said.

Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, and the two ladies,
attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance, and
were conveyed eastward, through some of the duskier portions of the
metropolis, to the great turreted donjon which overlooks the London
shipping. They all descended from their vehicle and entered the famous
inclosure; and they secured the services of a venerable beefeater, who,
though there were many other claimants for legendary information, made
a fine exclusive party of them and marched