ne had
showered him with benefactions. He saw the margin of time at their
disposal lengthened by several weeks. He bade his sister put herself
at her best, drank with her to their success, and went and engaged a
hairdresser and a maid. They went that night, in a hackney-coach, to
the play at Drury Lane.

The open-mouthed gazing of her new maid, the deftly spoken admiration
of her hairdresser, and the mirror upon her dressing-table, had
prepared Madge for triumph. Her expectations were not disappointed,
but they were almost forgotten. Her pleasure at sight of the restless,
chattering crowd; her interest in the performance; her joy in seeing,
in fine: supplanted half the consciousness of being seen. But she was,
indeed, stared at from all parts of the house; people looked, and
nudged one another; and the powdered bucks and beauties in the
side-boxes, glancing up, forgot their own looks in examining hers.

Ned was elated beyond measure. He praised her all the way home in the
coach, and when they stood at last on the step of their lodging-house,
he waited a moment before going in, and looked back toward the Strand,
half-thinking that some susceptible and adventurous admirer might have
followed their conveyance to the door.

The next day, Sunday, he took her to church, at St. James's in
Piccadilly, where they had difficulty in getting seats, and where
several pious dowagers were scandalised at the inattention of their
male company to the service. Ned walked out alone in the afternoon,
but, to his surprise, he was not accosted by any gentleman pretending
to recognise him as some one else, as a means of knowing him as
himself.

On Monday he made himself seen at numerous coffee-houses and taverns,
but, although he came upon two or three faces that he had noted in the
theatre, no one looked at him with any sign of recollection. "Well,
well," thought he, and afterward said to Madge, "in time they will
come to remember me as the lovely creature's escort; at first their
eyes will be all for the lovely creature herself."

They went to Covent Garden that evening, and to the Haymarket the
next; and subsequently to public assemblies: Madge everywhere
arresting attention, and exciting whispers and elbowings among
observers wherever she passed. At the public balls, she was asked to
dance, by fellows of whom neither she nor Ned approved, but who, Ned
finally came to urge, might be useful acquaintances as leading to
better ones. But