rs on certain packets of cigarettes.

"But there's some English underneath," said Ada; "I can just make it
out. Ap--Apro--Aprodyte. What a funny name!"

"You haven't prenounced it quite correckly," he said; "out there they
sound the ph like a f, and give all the syllables--Afroddity." He felt a
kind of intuition that this was nearer the correct rendering.

"Well," observed Ada, "she's got a silly look, don't you think?"

Leander was less narrow, and gave it as his opinion that she had been
"done from a fine woman."

Ada remarked that she herself would never consent to be taken in so
unbecoming a costume. "One might as well have no figure at all in things
hanging down for all the world like a sack," she said.

Proceeding to details, she was struck by the smallness of the hands; and
it must be admitted that, although the statue as a whole was slightly
above the average female height, the arms from the elbow downwards, and
particularly the hands, were by no means in proportion, and almost
justified Miss Parkinson's objection, that "no woman could have hands so
small as that."

"I know some one who has--quite as small," said he softly.

Ada instantly drew off one of the crimson gloves and held out her hand
beside the statue's. It was a well-shaped hand, as she very well knew,
but it was decidedly larger than the one with which she compared it. "I
_said_ so," she observed; "now are you satisfied, Mr. Tweddle?"

But he had been thinking of a hand more slender and dainty than hers,
and allowed himself to admit as much. "I--I wasn't meaning you at all,"
he said bluntly.

She laughed a little jarring laugh. "Oh, Matilda, of course! Nobody is
like Matilda now! But come, Mr. Tweddle, you're not going to stand there
and tell me that this wonderful Matilda of yours has hands no bigger
than those?"

"She has been endowed with quite remarkable small hands," said he; "you
wouldn't believe it without seeing. It so happens," he added suddenly,
"that I can give you a very fair ideer of the size they are, for I've
got a ring of hers in my pocket at this moment. It came about this way:
my aunt (the same that used to let her second floor to James, and that
Matilda lodges with at present), my aunt, as soon as she heard of our
being engaged, nothing would do but I must give Matilda an old ring with
a posy inside it, that was in our family, and we soon found the ring was
too large to keep on, and I left it with old Vidler, near my p