ted cap and red slippers," said
Lizzie Acton. "There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me
to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked."

"She was a soubrette," Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play
in her life. "They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to
learn French." Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a
vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red
shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible
tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean
house. "That is one reason in favor of their coming here," Gertrude went
on. "But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean to
begin--the next time."

Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his
earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. "I want you to make me a
promise, Gertrude," he said.

"What is it?" she asked, smiling.

"Not to get excited. Not to allow these--these occurrences to be an
occasion for excitement."

She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. "I don't
think I can promise that, father. I am excited already."

Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in
recognition of something audacious and portentous.

"I think they had better go to the other house," said Charlotte,
quietly.

"I shall keep them in the other house," Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more
pregnantly.

Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her cousin
Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this way
instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however, struck
him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance than
usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the inefficiency of
her father's design--if design it was--for diminishing, in the
interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign
relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his
liberality. "That 's a very nice thing to do," he said, "giving them
the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever
happens, you will be glad of it." Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew
he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it
recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence
with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.

"A three days' visit at