che recounted Nuttie's successes, and her own tennis
engagements for the week; Mark lay on a rug and teased her, and her
dachshund; Nuttie listened to the family chatter as if it were a play,
and May dispensed the cups, and looked grave and severe.

'Well?' said the Canon anxiously, when Mark, Blanche, and little Basil
had insisted on escorting the guests home, and he and his wife were for
a few minutes tete-a-tete.

'It might have been much worse,' said the lady. 'She is a good little
innocent thing, and has more good sense than I expected. Governessy,
that's all, but she will shake out of that.'

'Of course she will. It's the best thing imaginable for Alwyn!'

His wife kept back the words, 'A hundred times too good for Alwyn!'

CHAPTER XI.

LAWN-TENNIS.

'Madam, the guests are come, supper served up,
My young lady asked for!'--Romeo and Juliet.

A garden-party, Mrs. William Egremont decided, would be the best mode
of testifying her approbation of her sister-in-law, and introducing the
newcomers to the neighbourhood. So the invitations were sent forth for
an early day of the coming week.

From how many points of view was Mrs. William Egremont's garden-party
regarded, and how different! There was Basil, to whom it meant wearing
his velvet suit and eating as many ices as mother would allow. To
Blanche, it was an occasion for triumph on the tennis ground for
herself, and for hopes for her pupil; and Ursula herself looked forward
to it and practised for it like a knight for his first encounter in the
lists, her sole care being to distinguish herself with her racket. To
her mother, it was an ordeal, where she trusted not to be a
mortification to her husband and his family; while to the hostess, it
was a not unwelcome occasion of exercising honest diplomacy and tact,
not without a sense of magnanimity. To May, it was a bore to be
endured with dutiful philosophy; to her good-natured father an occasion
for hospitality, where he trusted that his brother would appear, and
appear to advantage, and was ready even to bribe him thereto with that
wonderful claret that Alwyn had always envied, and declared to be
wasted on a parson. And Mark, perhaps he viewed the occasion with
different eyes from any one else. At any rate, even the denizens of
Bridgefield mustered there with as many minds as Scott ascribes to the
combatants of Bannockburn, and there were probably as many other
circles of feeling more or