ush.

This was all the greater reason for going on. "I mean instead of
Burfield's."

Our young friend fairly pitied her; she had made her in an instant so
helpless, and yet not a bit haughty nor outraged. She was only mystified
and scared. "Oh, you know--?"

"Yes, I know!" Our young friend smiled, meeting the other's eyes, and,
having made Juno blush, proceeded to patronise her. "_I'll_ do it"--she
put out a competent hand. Her ladyship only submitted, confused and
bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next moment the
telegram was in the cage again and its author out of the shop. Then
quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her
tampering, the extraordinary little person at Cocker's made the proper
change. People were really too giddy, and if they _were_, in a certain
case, to be caught, it shouldn't be the fault of her own grand memory.
Hadn't it been settled weeks before?--for Miss Dolman it was always to be
"Cooper's."

CHAPTER XIV

But the summer "holidays" brought a marked difference; they were holidays
for almost every one but the animals in the cage. The August days were
flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she was conscious of the
ebb of her interest in the secrets of the refined. She was in a position
to follow the refined to the extent of knowing--they had made so many of
their arrangements with her aid--exactly where they were; yet she felt
quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and the band stopped
playing. A stray member of the latter occasionally turned up, but the
communications that passed before her bore now largely on rooms at
hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of trains, dates of sailings
and arrangements for being "met"; she found them for the most part
prosaic and coarse. The only thing was that they brought into her stuffy
corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows and Scotch moors as she
might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover in especial fat hot dull
ladies who had out with her, to exasperation, the terms for seaside
lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the matter of the number of beds
required, which was not less portentous: this in reference to places of
which the names--Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarborough,
Whitby--tormented her with something of the sound of the plash of water
that haunts the traveller in the desert. She had not been out of London
for a dozen years, and the only thing to g