Ethel, stroking the black head.

'I am only surprised at Leonard's forgetting his place,' said Aubrey.
'Walking before her majesty, indeed!'

'Oh, attendants do come first sometimes.'

'Then it should be backwards! I have a mind to try lying on the beach
to-morrow, looking interesting, to see what will descend upon me!'

'A great yellow mongrel,' said Ethel, 'as always befalls imitators in
the path of the hero.'

'What? You mean that it was all the work of Leonard's beaux yeux?'

Leonard gave a sort of growl, intimating that Aubrey was exciting his
displeasure; and Ethel was glad to be at home, and break off the
conversation; but in a few minutes Aubrey knocked at her door, and
edging himself in, mysteriously said, 'Such fun! So it was your beaux
yeux, not Leonard's, that made the conquest!'

'I suppose she was touched with what I said of poor Leonard's
circumstances, and the pleasure the creature gave him.'

'That is as prosy as Mary, Ethel. At any rate, the woman told Leonard
yours was the most irresistibly attractive countenance she ever saw,
short of beauty; and that's not the best of it, for he is absolutely
angry.

'No wonder,' laughed Ethel.

'No, but it's about the beauty! He can't conceive a face more
beautiful than yours.'

'Except the gargoyle on the church tower,' said Ethel, gaping into as
complete a model of that worthy as flesh and blood could perpetrate.

'But he means it,' persisted Aubrey, fixing his eyes critically on his
sister's features, but disturbed by the contortions into which she
threw them. 'Now don't, don't. I never saw any fellow with a
hundredth part of your gift for making faces,' he added, between the
unwilling paroxysms of mirth at each fresh grimace; but I want to judge
of you; and--oh! that solemn one is worse than all; it is like Julius
Caesar, if he had ever been photographed!--but really, when one comes
to think about it, you are not so very ugly after all; and are much
better looking than Flora, whom we were taught to believe in.'

'Poor Flora! You were no judge in her blooming days, before wear and
tear came.'

'And made her like our Scotch grandfather.'

'But Blanche! your own Blanche, Aubrey? She might have extended
Leonard's ideas of beauty.'

'Blanche has a pretty little visage of her own; but it's not so well
worth looking at as yours,' said Aubrey. 'One has seen to the end of
it at once; and it won't light up. Hers is just the May blossom; a