rs.
I'll go down to-morrow morning the first thing."

Ripton only wondered the husband of such a treasure could remain apart
from it. So thought Richard for a space.

"But if I go, Rip," he said despondently, "if I go for a day even I shall
have undone all my work with my father. She says it herself--you saw it
in her last letter."

"Yes," Ripton assented, and the words "Please remember me to dear Mr.
Thompson," fluttered about the Old Dog's heart.

It came to pass that Mrs. Berry, having certain business that led her
through Kensington Gardens, spied a figure that she had once dandled in
long clothes, and helped make a man of, if ever woman did. He was walking
under the trees beside a lady, talking to her, not indifferently. The
gentleman was her bridegroom and her babe. "I know his back," said Mrs.
Berry, as if she had branded a mark on it in infancy. But the lady was
not her bride. Mrs. Berry diverged from the path, and got before them on
the left flank; she stared, retreated, and came round upon the right.
There was that in the lady's face which Mrs. Berry did not like. Her
innermost question was, why he was not walking with his own wife? She
stopped in front of them. They broke, and passed about her. The lady made
a laughing remark to him, whereat he turned to look, and Mrs. Berry
bobbed. She had to bob a second time, and then he remembered the worthy
creature, and hailed her Penelope, shaking her hand so that he put her in
countenance again. Mrs. Berry was extremely agitated. He dismissed her,
promising to call upon her in the evening. She heard the lady slip out
something from a side of her lip, and they both laughed as she toddled
off to a sheltering tree to wipe a corner of each eye. "I don't like the
looks of that woman," she said, and repeated it resolutely.

"Why doesn't he walk arm-in-arm with her?" was her neat inquiry. "Where's
his wife?" succeeded it. After many interrogations of the sort, she
arrived at naming the lady a bold-faced thing; adding subsequently,
brazen. The lady had apparently shown Mrs. Berry that she wished to get
rid of her, and had checked the outpouring of her emotions on the breast
of her babe. "I know a lady when I see one," said Mrs. Berry. "I haven't
lived with 'em for nothing; and if she's a lady bred and born, I wasn't
married in the church alive."

Then, if not a lady, what was she? Mrs. Berry desired to know: "She's
imitation lady, I'm sure she is!" Berry vowed. "I say s