' said Emmeline, with simplicity. 'I suppose it is because
he breaks the commandments. But I wonder how a big rich lord can want to
steal anything.' Emmeline's thoughts of breaking commandments
instinctively fell upon the eighth, as being in her ideas the only case
wherein the gain could be considered as at all worth the hazard.

Ethelberta said nothing; but Christopher thought that a shade of
depression passed over her.

'Hook back the gate, Joey,' shouted Emmeline, when the carriage had
proceeded up the drive. 'There's more to come.'

Joey did as ordered, and by the time he got indoors another carriage
turned in from the public road--a one-horse brougham this time.

'I know who that is: that's Mr. Ladywell,' said Emmeline, in the same
matter-of-fact tone. 'He's been here afore: he's a distant relation of
the squire's, and he once gave me sixpence for picking up his gloves.'

'What shall I live to see?' murmured the poetess, under her breath,
nearly dropping her teacup in an involuntary trepidation, from which she
made it a point of dignity to recover in a moment. Christopher's eyes,
at that exhibition from Ethelberta, entered her own like a pair of
lances. Picotee, seeing Christopher's quick look of jealousy, became
involved in her turn, and grew pale as a lily in her endeavours to
conceal the complications to which it gave birth in her poor little
breast likewise.

'You judge me very wrongly,' said Ethelberta, in answer to Christopher's
hasty look of resentment.

'In supposing Mr. Ladywell to be a great friend of yours?' said
Christopher, who had in some indescribable way suddenly assumed a right
to Ethelberta as his old property.

'Yes: for I hardly know him, and certainly do not value him.'

After this there was something in the mutual look of the two, though
their words had been private, which did not tend to remove the anguish of
fragile Picotee. Christopher, assured that Ethelberta's embarrassment
had been caused by nothing more than the sense of her odd social
subsidence, recovered more bliss than he had lost, and regarded calmly
the profile of young Ladywell between the two windows of his brougham as
it passed the open cottage door, bearing him along unconscious as the
dead of the nearness of his beloved one, and of the sad buffoonery that
fate, fortune, and the guardian angels had been playing with Ethelberta
of late. He recognized the face as that of the young man whom he had
encountered w