eing.

'I say you _must_ do this, and you _must_ do that, as if you were a
child,' remarked Adelaide. 'A privileged friend of mine tells me this
use of the imperative comes of being so constantly in nobody's society
but my own.'

'Ah, yes. I suppose she is right.'

Cytherea called the friend 'she' by a rule of ladylike practice; for a
woman's 'friend' is delicately assumed by another friend to be of their
own sex in the absence of knowledge to the contrary; just as cats are
called she's until they prove themselves he's.

Miss Hinton laughed mysteriously.

'I get a humorous reproof for it now and then, I assure you,' she
continued.

'"Humorous reproof:" that's not from a woman: who can reprove humorously
but a man?' was the groove of Cytherea's thought at the remark. 'Your
brother reproves you, I expect,' said that innocent young lady.

'No,' said Miss Hinton, with a candid air. ''Tis only a professional man
I am acquainted with.' She looked out of the window.

Women are persistently imitative. No sooner did a thought flash
through Cytherea's mind that the man was a lover than she became a Miss
Aldclyffe in a mild form.

'I imagine he's a lover,' she said.

Miss Hinton smiled a smile of experience in that line.

Few women, if taxed with having an admirer, are so free from vanity
as to deny the impeachment, even if it is utterly untrue. When it does
happen to be true, they look pityingly away from the person who is so
benighted as to have got no further than suspecting it.

'There now--Miss Hinton; you are engaged to be married!' said Cytherea
accusingly.

Adelaide nodded her head practically. 'Well, yes, I am,' she said.

The word 'engaged' had no sooner passed Cytherea's lips than the sound
of it--the mere sound of her own lips--carried her mind to the time and
circumstances under which Miss Aldclyffe had used it towards herself.
A sickening thought followed--based but on a mere surmise; yet its
presence took every other idea away from Cytherea's mind. Miss Hinton
had used Edward's words about towns; she mentioned Mr. Springrove as
attending to her garden. It could not be that Edward was the man! that
Miss Aldclyffe had planned to reveal her rival thus!

'Are you going to be married soon?' she inquired, with a steadiness the
result of a sort of fascination, but apparently of indifference.

'Not very soon--still, soon.'

'Ah-ha! In less than three months?' said Cytherea.

'Two.'

Now that the sub