by the gentlemen, and with some slight trepidation and a
"fearful joy" by the ladies. He was more than ever convinced that mother
and daughter had forgotten their lineal Desboroughs, and he resolved to
leave any allusion to it to the young lady herself.

She, however, availed herself of that privilege the evening after her
arrival. "Who'd have thought of meeting YOU here?" she said, sweeping
her skirts away to make room for him on a sofa. "It's a coon's age
since I saw you--not since you gave us that letter to those genealogical
gentlemen in London."

The consul hoped that it had proved successful.

"Yes, but maw guessed we didn't care to go back to Hengist and Horsa,
and when they let loose a lot of 'Debboroughs' and 'Daybrooks' upon us,
maw kicked! We've got a drawing ten yards long, that looks like a sour
apple tree, with lots of Desboroughs hanging up on the branches like
last year's pippins, and I guess about as worm-eaten. We took that well
enough, but when it came to giving us a map of straight lines and dashes
with names written under them like an old Morse telegraph slip, struck
by lightning, then maw and I guessed that it made us tired.

"You know," she went on, opening her clear gray eyes on the consul, with
a characteristic flash of shrewd good sense through her quaint humor,
"we never reckoned where this thing would land us, and we found we
were paying a hundred pounds, not only for the Desboroughs, but all the
people they'd MARRIED, and their CHILDREN, and children's children, and
there were a lot of outsiders we'd never heard of, nor wanted to hear
of. Maw once thought she'd got on the trail of a Plantagenet, and
followed it keen, until she found she had been reading the dreadful
thing upside down. Then we concluded we wouldn't take any more stock in
the family until it had risen."

During this speech the consul could not help noticing that, although her
attitude was playfully confidential to him, her voice really was pitched
high enough to reach the ears of smaller groups around her, who were not
only following her with the intensest admiration, but had shamelessly
abandoned their own conversation, and had even faced towards her. Was
she really posing in her naivete? There was a certain mischievous,
even aggressive, consciousness in her pretty eyelids. Then she suddenly
dropped both eyes and voice, and said to the consul in a genuine aside,
"I like this sort of thing much better."

The consul looke