"

Mr. Varga hastened to assure her that he was her most humble servant,
and only awaited her commands.

"But this question is very, very important."

Mr. Varga assured her that he was ready for anything in the world; even
if her ladyship should require him to leap through the window, he was
prepared to do so.

"I am going to ask you a question, to which I require a perfectly
sincere answer. You must be perfectly frank towards me. Fancy yourself
for the moment my dear father, about to give to me, your daughter, good
counsel on the eve of my entering into the world."

She said these words with so much feeling, and in a voice that seemed to
come so directly from the bottom of her heart, that Mr. Varga, for the
life of him, could not help drawing from the inside pocket of his
dolman a checkered cotton pocket-handkerchief, with which he dried his
eyes.

"What is it your ladyship deigns to command?" he inquired, in a voice
that sounded as if every syllable he uttered were shod with as tight
jackboots as the ones he was himself wearing.

"I want you to be so good as to go through all the names written on this
list, one by one, and tell me quite frankly, quite openly, what your
opinion is of each one of them, what their dispositions are, how the
world regards them, which of them are likely to love one, and which are
likely to give one the cold shoulder."

In all his life Mr. Varga had never had to face so rigorous an ordeal.

If Lady Karpathy had charged him to call out five or six of the persons
who were down on the list, or take a message to each one of them
individually and to go on foot, or to work out the genealogy of every
one of them in the shortest conceivable space of time, he would have
considered all such commissions as mere trifles compared with what was
required of him now. What! he, the humblest of retainers in his own
estimation, who regarded with such boundless respect every member of the
higher circles that he would have considered himself the most miserable
of men had he failed, in addressing them, to give them every tittle of
their proper titles and designations--he, forsooth, was now to sit in
judgment on these great gentlemen and ladies who did him too much honour
in allowing him to address them at all?

In his despair Mr. Varga scoured the floor with his heel, and his
forehead with the checkered handkerchief.

Fanny, perceiving the confusion of the good old man, turned towards him
with a loo