me the table--all the rest,
all the other effects, come afterwards."

CHAPTER VII

"Then you _do_ see them?" the girl again asked.

Mrs. Jordan hesitated, and indeed the point had been ambiguous before.
"Do you mean the guests?"

Her young friend, cautious about an undue exposure of innocence, was not
quite sure. "Well--the people who live there."

"Lady Ventnor? Mrs. Bubb? Lord Rye? Dear, yes. Why they _like_ one."

"But does one personally _know_ them?" our young lady went on, since that
was the way to speak. "I mean socially, don't you know?--as you know
_me_."

"They're not so nice as you!" Mrs. Jordan charmingly cried. "But I
_shall_ see more and more of them."

Ah this was the old story. "But how soon?"

"Why almost any day. Of course," Mrs. Jordan honestly added, "they're
nearly always out."

"Then why do they want flowers all over?"

"Oh that doesn't make any difference." Mrs. Jordan was not philosophic;
she was just evidently determined it _shouldn't_ make any. "They're
awfully interested in my ideas, and it's inevitable they should meet me
over them."

Her interlocutress was sturdy enough. "What do you call your ideas?"

Mrs. Jordan's reply was fine. "If you were to see me some day with a
thousand tulips you'd discover."

"A thousand?"--the girl gaped at such a revelation of the scale of it;
she felt for the instant fairly planted out. "Well, but if in fact they
never do meet you?" she none the less pessimistically insisted.

"Never? They _often_ do--and evidently quite on purpose. We have grand
long talks."

There was something in our young lady that could still stay her from
asking for a personal description of these apparitions; that showed too
starved a state. But while she considered she took in afresh the whole
of the clergyman's widow. Mrs. Jordan couldn't help her teeth, and her
sleeves were a distinct rise in the world. A thousand tulips at a
shilling clearly took one further than a thousand words at a penny; and
the betrothed of Mr. Mudge, in whom the sense of the race for life was
always acute, found herself wondering, with a twinge of her easy
jealousy, if it mightn't after all then, for _her_ also, be better--better
than where she was--to follow some such scent. Where she was was where
Mr. Buckton's elbow could freely enter her right side and the counter-
clerk's breathing--he had something the matter with his nose--pervade her
left ear. It was som