ore to the tea-room. Lucilla, longing as much as she dreaded to see
him, felt her heart throb at the sound of each manly footstep on the
stair, paled at the sight of coat and trousers of a certain shade,
trembled at the sound of a voice that recalled his hesitating tones.
But he came never again. The "bounce" which Miss Dawson had counselled
had had its effect. Either he now disbelieved the evidence of his own
eyes, or, more probably, he bowed, as a gentleman would, to her desire
to disavow the acquaintanceship.

"A man in his position could not meet on equal ground a girl in mine;
and--and I won't meet him on any other level," she said to herself.
Aloud, she would not speak of him again. Neither did Miss Dawson any
more allude to the gentleman who had presented the violets and the
volume of plays, and with whom she had gone for a walk on the first
evening of their acquaintanceship. Relations between the young women,
never very friendly, had become strained since that evening.

"A girl who could do such a thing!" said Lucilla to herself; and held
her head disdainfully, and curled her lip at the other girl.

But Miss Dawson, if she noticed that scornful attitude, was not at all
impressed by it. She switched her brown skirt with more than her usual
air of jaunty alertness around the chairs and tables, looked in the
little glass behind the screen at which the pair adjusted their caps
and aprons with a smirk of self-satisfaction, and always wore a bunch
of Princess violets in the bosom of her dress. Soon, the string of
amber beads at her throat was discarded in favour of a gold chain and
pearl and turquoise pendant, which Lucilla despised as imitation, of
course, but which, nevertheless, looked real.

Then, one day, at an hour when the tea-room was empty, arrived a
letter, from her influential aunt at Workingham, for Lucilla.

A certain portion of this letter she read again and again; then, the
need to a bursting heart of the outlet of speech being imperative,
spake with her tongue.

"Your advice to me to--bounce it--wasn't very happy advice, Miss
Dawson," she said, with bitterness. "Captain Finch knew all the time.
He knew when he came to this place. He came to see me. He knew I served
in a tea-shop. It made no difference. He went to my uncle the day after
the dance, and spoke--spoke about me----" Her voice was not under
control; she turned away.

Miss Dawson, energetically rubbing a bamboo table on which some coffe