neighbours--Mrs Abbott's Mary,
Dorcas, and Hester, Mrs Townsend's Rebecca, my Lady Woodward's Dulcibel
and Grissel, and such like; and our Doll, I am in hopes, shall be back
from Suffolk, and maybe her cousin Bessy with her. I have asked Mr
Louvaine to come, and twain more of my Lord Oxford's gentlemen; and Mr
Manners, Mr Stone, and our Tom, shall be there. What say you?"

Lady Louvaine looked with a smile at her granddaughter, who sat in the
window with a book. She was not altogether satisfied with the
Rookwoods, yet less from anything they said or did than from what they
omitted to say and do. They came regularly to church, they attended the
Sacrament, they asked the Vicar to their dinner-parties, they were very
affable and friendly to their neighbours. There was absolutely nothing
on which it was possible to lay a reproving finger, and say, This is
what I do not like. And yet, while she could no more give a reason for
distrusting them than the schoolboy for objecting to the famous Dr
Fell, she did instinctively distrust them. Still, Lettice was a good
girl, on the whole a discreet girl; she had very few pleasures,
especially such as took her outside her home, and gave her the
companionship of girls of her own age. Lettice had been taught, as all
Puritan maidens were, that "life is, to do the will of God," and that
pleasure was not to be sought at all, and scarcely to be accepted except
in its simplest forms, and as coming naturally along with the duties of
life. An admirable lesson--a lesson which girls sadly need to learn
now, if only for the lowest reason--that pleasures thus taken are
infinitely more pleasing than when sought, and the taste for them is
keener and more enduring. To the moral taste, no less than the
physical, plain fare with a good appetite is incomparably more enjoyable
than the finest dainties with none: and the moral appetite can cloy and
pall at least as soon as the physical. Lettice's healthy moral nature
had been content with the plain fare, and had never cried out for
dainties. But, like all young folks, she liked a pleasant change, and
her grandmother, who had thought her looking pale and somewhat languid
with the summer heat in town, was glad that she should have the
enjoyment. She knew she might trust her.

Not even to herself did Lady Louvaine confess her deepest reason for
allowing Lettice to go to the apple-cast--an assembly resembling in its
nature the American "bee," an