have half promised them you shall come.'

The steps were let down, and Elfride was transferred--to the intense
delight of the little girls, and to the mild interest of loungers with
red skins and long necks, who cursorily eyed the performance with their
walking-sticks to their lips, occasionally laughing from far down their
throats and with their eyes, their mouths not being concerned in the
operation at all. Lord Luxellian then told the coachman to drive on,
lifted his hat, smiled a smile that missed its mark and alighted on a
total stranger, who bowed in bewilderment. Lord Luxellian looked long at
Elfride.

The look was a manly, open, and genuine look of admiration; a momentary
tribute of a kind which any honest Englishman might have paid to
fairness without being ashamed of the feeling, or permitting it to
encroach in the slightest degree upon his emotional obligations as
a husband and head of a family. Then Lord Luxellian turned away, and
walked musingly to the upper end of the promenade.

Mr. Swancourt had alighted at the same time with Elfride, crossing over
to the Row for a few minutes to speak to a friend he recognized there;
and his wife was thus left sole tenant of the carriage.

Now, whilst this little act had been in course of performance, there
stood among the promenading spectators a man of somewhat different
description from the rest. Behind the general throng, in the rear of the
chairs, and leaning against the trunk of a tree, he looked at Elfride
with quiet and critical interest.

Three points about this unobtrusive person showed promptly to
the exercised eye that he was not a Row man pur sang. First, an
irrepressible wrinkle or two in the waist of his frock-coat--denoting
that he had not damned his tailor sufficiently to drive that tradesman
up to the orthodox high pressure of cunning workmanship. Second, a
slight slovenliness of umbrella, occasioned by its owner's habit of
resting heavily upon it, and using it as a veritable walking-stick,
instead of letting its point touch the ground in the most coquettish of
kisses, as is the proper Row manner to do. Third, and chief reason, that
try how you might, you could scarcely help supposing, on looking at his
face, that your eyes were not far from a well-finished mind, instead of
the well-finished skin et praeterea nihil, which is by rights the Mark
of the Row.

The probability is that, had not Mrs. Swancourt been left alone in her
carriage under the